


Ghosts in Quicksilver (BOOK ONE: SALT)

by Elliott Dunstan (rokosourobouros)



Series: Ghosts in Quicksilver [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Anarchy, Asexual Character, Asexuality Spectrum, Canon Queer Character of Color, Canon Queer Relationship, Canon Trans Character, Childhood Trauma, Communism, Death, F/F, Fae & Fairies, Ghosts, Lesbian Character, Lesbian Character of Color, Minor Character Death, No Lesbians Die, Nonbinary Character, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, POV Lesbian Character, Paranormal, Paranormal Investigators, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychic Abilities, Queer Character, Queer Culture, Queer History, Queer Themes, Queer Youth, Sex Work, Sexual Harassment, Sikh Character, Stalking, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, Urban Fantasy, Urban Legends, Useless Lesbians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:40:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 36,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22958824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokosourobouros/pseuds/Elliott%20Dunstan
Summary: Jamal Kaye is not what you would call ‘destined for success’. She’s a struggling teenager with a stubborn smoking habit (gross), a Facebook page for a private detective firm (employees: one) and an annoying ability to commune with the dead. But soon, she’s stuck with her first case – a missing persons case she already knows is a murder mystery – and before long, she’s pitched headfirst into Ottawa’s supernatural underbelly. Who is Greeneyes? Why do they care so much about Jamal? Time to find out, or become another statistic.Ghosts in Quicksilver is a New Adult urban fantasy/hopepunk serial.
Series: Ghosts in Quicksilver [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1649875
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	1. The Vanishing of Mr. Chaudhury

**Author's Note:**

> For more information on GIQ and Alkimia Fables as a whole, check out elliottdunstan.com/alkimia! Chapters are originally posted on Wordpress, and make it here in their edited forms.
> 
> GIQ is a queer urban fantasy story about leftist communities, mentally ill marginalized folks, alternate forms of justice, and autistic trauma. Also, there are sapphic hero/villain flirting sessions, morgue break-ins, and all-natural acid trips. If you like Middlegame (Seanan McGuire), Dresden Files (Jim Butcher), Onion Girl/Widdershins/Blue Girl (Charles de Lint) or Sister Mine (Nalo Hopkinson), you'll probably like this.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "From the thunder, and the storm—  
> And the cloud that took the form  
> (When the rest of Heaven was blue)  
> Of a demon in my view—"
> 
> -Alone, Edgar Allan Poe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: death, child abuse, racism

Mrs. Chaudhury walked up the narrow steps into my office at six in the afternoon, and the ghost of her dead husband followed behind.

It wasn’t much of an office yet, really. It felt more like a closet, especially with all the boxes still scattered around, labelled variously with ‘books,’ ‘random crap,’ ‘personal shit,’ so on, so forth— and I had my head too deep in one of said boxes to hear her arrival through my muttered curses.

"Is this the Private Investigations office?"

I started upwards at the voice, nearly banging my head on the cardboard. I managed to get myself free and then cleared my throat.

  
  


I tried not to look too obviously at the clearly-dead man standing to the left of her shoulder. I saw plenty of ghosts. Usually, they minded their own business. Instead of staring, I brushed some lint off my shoulder and offered what I hoped was a comforting smile. "Yes, that’s me. I’m just—setting up."

"Oh." The woman twisted her fingers into the loose tassels of her headscarf, eyes downcast. They were red and raw , lined with a dark green pencil that did nothing to hide the shadows of sleeplessness at the edges of her lids, and I dared a quick glance at the broad-shouldered ghost at her shoulder. He stared back at me and said nothing.

"Are you open for business, then?"

I hesitated. Technically, _no—_ but I had a horrible, sinking feeling in my stomach that I already knew what she was going to ask. I didn’t trust my voice, so I just nodded. Might as well get it over with.

The woman nodded back, a small smile lighting up her face with hope. "My name is Chandra Chaudhury, and my—my husband is missing. The police say they’ve tried everything, but—I’m—I’m scared he—" She swallowed, closed her eyes, and tears poured down her face, pooling in the dimples of her cheeks and then overflowing. Nobody liked to fear the worst. Nobody could avoid it forever, either.

I took a deep breath. "Sit down, Mrs. Chaudhury. I’ll see what I can do." I avoided the ghost’s silent glare. I already knew what I was going to find.

  
\---

The first time I spoke to a dead person, I was five years old and so was he. The attic of the house was the one place where the foster kids weren’t allowed, even to clean, but I could hear his voice. I let Johara sleep—she was only two—and I followed his crying, up the stairs and into the creaking, dusty quiet.

His name was Alan. I don’t think I understood that he was already dead—only that when I tried to touch him, he flinched away before I could realize that he was nothing but an illusion. But I understood the burns on his neck and arms, and I understood the jagged angle of his neck. 

\---

There’s little more embarrassing than taking someone into a room that you _know_ isn’t ready, but I tried my best to keep my face up. There was a desk, at least—a heavy, wooden, ancient thing sitting at the far end, a gift from the previous tenant—but I hadn’t gone anywhere near the horrendous yellow floral wallpaper yet, and the holes in the back wall didn’t have more than a halfhearted coat of plaster over them. It wasn’t much of an office, but it was what I had.

"Have a seat," I said without thinking about it—and then leapt forward to pull a box off the one chair I’d managed to salvage from somebody’s porch last garbage day. "Uh. There we go." I sat on the other side of the desk, hoping she couldn’t tell I was just sitting on a box of books. 

"You look ridiculous," came a voice at my shoulder. I ignored it as well as I could. Jo didn’t know when to shut up.

"So, what’s going on? Tell me as much as you can."

Mrs. Chaudhury’s fingers left her headscarf’s tassels, and instead started playing with the silver bangle on her wrist. She couldn’t have been more than thirty or so, and I wondered when she’d gotten married.

"My husband’s name is Gurjas, Gurjas Singh Chaudhury—I, I have copies of his ID—" She pulled them out, and I blinked a little at the pieces of paper she’d extricated from her purse. I supposed especially with all the nonsense going on south of the border, it couldn’t hurt to be _extra_ careful with documentation. "There, that’s a copy of his driver’s license, his birth certificate, his passport—"

"Wait, a _copy_ of his passport? Did he take it with him?"

She shook her head and laughed a little. "I’m—I’m getting all mixed up. I’m sorry. He didn’t take anything unusual with him. He just went to work and didn’t come back." She pulled out another piece of paper. "I called his manager and he said there wasn’t anything unusual, but this is his phone number, and the phone number of some of his colleagues—I don’t _think_ they did anything, but maybe they’ll say something to you that they wouldn’t to me—"

I reached forward and took a gentle hold of her wrist. "Mrs. Chaudhury. Take a deep breath."

She stared at my hand, then let her shoulders fall. "Sorry. I’m—sorry." The reaction of somebody who’d been told she was overreacting and hysterical a couple too many times lately. Ugh. I hated that I knew what that looked like.

I wasn’t sure what to say. She was frantic, but her panicking had been productive. I _did_ need all this stuff. I just needed a story first. "When did you last see your husband?" I sat back and grabbed a notepad from the half-empty box next to me, patting my pockets for a pen.

"He works nights as a nurse at the Civic. I last saw him three nights ago—October, um… October third. His shifts start at eleven so it must have been about ten o’clock or so. I’d just put the kids to bed."

I wrote that down. "Kids?"

"We have two—Ruben’s six, and Sulha is turning three." A small smile appeared on her face, even though her eyes still shone with tears. "Sulha doesn’t really understand what’s happening. I’m not sure what to tell her. She loves her father, you know?"

I returned the smile the best that I could.

"Are you going to tell her?" came the voice at my shoulder again. I didn’t turn to look at Johara , but I knew what expression she’d have on her face—sad and pleading, trying to get me to do something. It was a good thing Mrs. Chaudhury couldn’t see her.

Instead, I ducked my head back towards the pad. "When did you contact the police?"

"When I woke up in the morning and he wasn’t back yet."

"Really? That fast?" I tapped the pen against my cheek. "Why’d you think there was something wrong?"

She shook her head, lips pursing in confusion. "I woke up and—he wasn’t there. He’s always home by seven-thirty, _always._ I waited until eight, then I called his manager, and then the police." She gave me a hard look, as if daring me to challenge her. I wasn’t going to bother. I had enough self-preservation not to fight a scared mother on her decisions. "They asked me if I had reason to be worried for his life."

"Did you?"

"He’s received death threats from patients and coworkers before. Not many, but enough. So, yes."

"What kind of death threats? Like, specific ones or just generally aggressive?"

She shrugged, suddenly looking a little lost again. "Mostly general, I think. He brushed them off—kept telling me not to worry."

"Wait, so—he’s been missing for three days, he’s gotten death threats before, and the cops have already given up?" That was just _wrong._ Unfortunately, it all sounded par for the course too. Freakin’ typical. I’d seen firsthand how little they cared when it was brown or Black people in trouble.

Her lips went thin and white, and she gave another brisk nod. Behind her, Gurjas’s ghost reached out. I wanted to tell him that he couldn’t touch her, that he should look away, but I couldn’t say that while Mrs. Chaudhury still had hope.

"Can I talk to him?" Johara asked. I gave an almost-imperceptible nod, focusing on the pad of paper that was rapidly filling up. Jo moved over to the half-faded man, and I caught only a few words of their conversation before Mrs. Chaudhury began to speak again, the tension in her voice carefully controlled.

"They told me to prepare for the possibility that he might have—that—" She swallowed, breathed out, and tried again. "That Gurjas might have just left me. But I know him. He wouldn’t do that, and I don’t care how hopeless or romantic or innocent that sounds, he wouldn’t do this to me or our children." She reached for her purse again. "I’ll pay, anything you want. I just need him home."

_I can’t accept your money._ It stuck in my throat. It would have been so easy— _so easy—_ to tell her the truth. That her husband was dead, and that his spirit was behind her, trying desperately to tell her that he was _here,_ he’d come _back,_ he’d come _home—_ and then what? She’d leave, heartbroken and disbelieving, Gurjas wouldn’t be any closer to reaching his rest, and… Despite myself, I glanced around the almost-office. I thought about the bills that needed paying, the grocery money that didn’t exist. My last family had given me a bit of food, a bit of money, enough to get me situated, but—

"You understand that I can’t guarantee anything."

"Of course." Her eyes shone—with tears, for sure, but determination as well. She wasn’t planning on taking no for an answer. "I need to know."

I became aware of a sharp glare from the corner, where Jo was still speaking to Gurjas in low, soft tones. I knew what _that_ meant. It meant a lot of inconvenient hauntings if I _didn’t_ do it.

"Alright. We have a deal."

I tried not to feel a little nauseous at the happy, hopeful look on her face—or the dawning realization that maybe I was kind of an asshole.


	2. Dearly Reluctant Departed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I will tell thee very briefly - these have no longer any hope of death."
> 
> -Canto III, Dante's Inferno

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: referenced sexual harassment

I closed the door behind Mrs. Chaudhury with a cheery wave goodbye—then pressed my head against the wood with a deep, long-suffering sigh. I could feel a migraine coming on already.

"What?" Johara asked peevishly, like _she_ had any right to be cranky. I glared at her – in response, she flickered a little in the light and had the decency to look a little embarrassed. She was having a fairly solid day today, her few flickers aside; most of the time, she was monochrome, with the slightly out-of-focus look of an old Polaroid. If I focused my eyes, she’d be a little clearer, but that took effort. Right now, though, she looked more like a normal bratty twelve-year-old who’d taken a bath in grey paint… well, and replaced her feet with trails of white smoke. _Those_ only showed up every now and again.

Ghosts, in short, made no sense to me. Old ones were like bad photocopies, new ones felt like excellent CGI, and even my sister – aside from the basic tenets of ‘never aging’ and ‘vaguely greyish-white’ – didn’t seem to follow much in the way of rules.

"So I’m solving a _murder_ now?" I asked finally, unable to keep the exhaustion out of my voice. I had literally just moved. My nerves had all the strength of the chewed-up couch springs I’d slept on last night.

She shrugged it off. "I mean, you can talk to ghosts. You kind of have the upper hand on the police—"

"Jo, I’m _seventeen._ " I blew a strand of red hair out of my face—when it stubbornly refused to move, I yanked it back behind my ear instead, and glanced over my shoulder. The stairs up to our landing seemed imbued with a certain foreboding air, but that was probably just my anxiety. Just because I _could_ talk to dead people didn’t mean it was…comfortable. Jo was fine. Jo was different. I’d known her _before_ she died, and trust me, that makes a pretty big difference. "How am I supposed to solve a murder? I don’t know how to solve a tax form."

"I dunno. Ask him?" she asked, with a tone that clearly meant she thought I was stupid. She probably wasn’t far off.

"Why didn’t _you?_ " I shot back. Mostly to avoid the question.

"I was explaining the whole ghost thing." She crossed her arms and gave me an unimpressed look. "Since you didn’t."

"Oh, would you— _Argh._ " I opened the door again and slipped outside, closing the door in Jo’s face. She drifted through the wood, still wearing the same unimpressed face. So, pointless, but gratifying anyway. I checked the For Rent sign still wired to the banister. The phone number seemed right. It was big and clear. I debated putting sparkles on it. Maybe some neon lights.

"Staring at it isn’t going to get you a roommate."

I— _barely—_ managed to suppress the urge to roll my eyes. "What, am I going to get another lecture on how I should be a medium for hire or… seancer or whatever you call it? It’s bad enough you roped me into _this_ nonsense."

"How is it a bad thing? Besides, _you_ said _yes._ "

I gave the banister a sullen kick. She wasn’t _wrong._ I just didn’t want to talk to the guy. But rent was rent, and I’d already taken her money, and her deposit wasn’t enough to skip town with. So I was stuck. Besides, I’d wanted to be a private investigator. I just thought it would mean using Google for old ladies and catching cheating bastards in the act. 

I opened the door again, letting Jo through this time. It was only polite, even if I wanted to kick her teeth in. God help her if I ever figured out how.

—

I don’t really remember how Jo died. I mean, I know _how_ she died. Two idiot white boys stole their parent’s car and went for a cruise at night with a bottle of whiskey in the front seat. She and one of the foster kids were fooling around—or at least that’s how he’d put it, which means he’d locked her out and told her she could only come back in if she took off her shirt. Evil little shit. She’d decided not to play and crossed the road at the wrong time.

I _know_ all that. I just don’t remember it. My memory just sort of—skips from having a sister who breathed and blushed and tired to living with a girl who nobody else could see and who followed me with a distracted patience. It took her a few months to wake up properly, and by then we’d both gotten used to it again. There were other things to worry about, and it’s not like I ever talked to anybody else anyway. Jamal and Johara. Two peas in a pod. Same as always.

—

Gurjas Chaudhury was waiting very patiently for me—for us—once I got back up the stairs. It was unnerving. Rather, _he_ was unnerving—just short of six feet tall, floating pearly-grey about an inch above my hardwood floor. It was the kind of floating that didn’t _look_ like floating—his feet were firmly planted, just on a ground I couldn’t see. Every now and again, the textured fog that made up his body shimmered and faded, reacting to unseen wind or strong emotion, leaving trails of essence tapering off of his turban or from the edges of his heels. 

"You lied to my wife."

Ah. "Yes." I hesitated. "You’re blunt. That’s useful."

"How old are you?"

This wasn’t going my way at all. If Jo wasn’t already dead, I would have killed her. "Does it matter?" I replied smoothly. "I can see you. I’d say that’s a mark in my favour." I saved any commentary on Johara’s sudden, gleaming smile for later. I _did_ listen, sometimes. When I felt like it.

"I suppose," he said, with the restrained kind of annoyance that I was used to seeing in adults. "What do you want to know?"

Well, he was being _shockingly_ unhelpful. "What happened. Obviously." I bit my tongue to stop myself from being more sarcastic.

Another measured look. How frustrating. I felt so measured he probably could have told me my weight in milligrams. "I was murdered."

"Yeah, I _figured_ as much. Who did it?" Okay, I lost the battle against the sarcasm, but he was earning it and then some.

"Greeneyes." The answer—cryptic and short as it was—burst from his mouth and came so quickly on the heels of my question that I couldn’t help starting a little in surprise. I wasn’t the only one. From the shocked look on his face, that clearly hadn’t been what he meant to say.

I crossed the room slowly, and sat down at my desk, not taking my eyes off of him and wishing for all the world that I had a properly-intimidating swivel chair. "So, Jo, when you said you filled him in on ‘the ghost stuff,’ you didn’t include—"

"—The part where we can’t lie?" she finished sweetly. "I hadn’t gotten there yet."

Have I mentioned I love my baby sister?

I love my baby sister.

Gurjas shot her a deathly—haha—look, and she made a doe-eyed look of innocence back at him.

"Oh, don’t get mad at her," I said, trying to conceal my annoyance. Not very successfully, I should add. I’m not great with subtlety. "You’re the one giving us the run-around on what should be a pretty open and shut question. So what _were_ you going to say?’

"Ghosts can’t _lie?_ " he said instead, with a look of dawning horror.

"Nope. That trick only worked because you weren’t expecting it, though." I twirled my pen over my fingers. "Now that you _know_ you can’t lie directly, you’re free to misdirect, conceal, or otherwise keep your trap shut as much as you want to." Then I chewed on the end of the pen, staring at Gurjas. This _really_ wasn’t adding up. "So let’s get back to the part where you were _trying_ to. You’re haunting your wife, you glared me into taking the job, got my sister into intimidate me into it—"

"Oh, no, I did that all on my own," Jo added. I ignored her, struggling not to smile.

"The point is—the _point_ is, you could just _tell me_ what happened. I mean, if you just said that you didn’t see who killed you, I’d get it. But I’m guessing that’s not the case."

He was silent, an unreadable expression flickering over his features. I didn’t know what to think. Maybe if I’d been a real private investigator—or a real medium, at that—the whole thing would have been less overwhelmingly weird.

"I want you to bring my body home," he said finally. "Give my kids some closure. I don’t want Chandra thinking I left her, or ran away. But I don’t want you trying to solve this."

"Even though you just told me who did it."

Kudos to Gurjas. He just nodded, and didn’t throw anything at me. _I_ would have.

I frowned, then glanced over at Johara. She looked just as confused as I did, and I wondered—not for the first time in the last few minutes—what their conversation had actually entailed.

"You’re a child. Let my wife bury me. The rest you should leave to adults."

I felt Johara’s eyes on me, and I kept my curled fist under the desk and my face in as much of a mask as I could manage it. "Sure. Yeah. I can do that." _Who the fuck is Greeneyes?_ I could ask him straight up, but now he knew he couldn’t lie, so he’d just purse his lips and I wouldn’t get anywhere. "Where am I going?"

"LeBreton Flats."

"Great. The part of Ottawa that fun forgot."

Gurjas didn’t laugh. I didn’t like him much—but I guess judging the recently murdered on their sense of humour wasn’t particularly _fair,_ either. And Mrs. Chaudhury…

_I need to know._

"Fine. You stay here. Or wander off and haunt somewhere else, I don’t care. Just give me a little space." Okay, I could probably be nicer to him, but something about him was rubbing me the wrong way. Hah. Like I didn’t know. _Pretentious, arrogant, condescending…_

I stood up and headed for the stairs, taking a second to glance outside. It didn’t _look_ too cold, and the leaves were only starting to tinge orange at the corners, but the wind was whistling through them in fits and starts. I was struck with the sense that I was missing something again; not about the case in particular, just that there was another hole that needed filling, something else I’d forgotten to do, somebody else I’d let down. It was autumn. It was late in the year already. It was autumn. It was autumn—

—And the doorbell rang and brought me hurtling down to earth. Ow. "Uh…" I stared down the stairs. What?

Johara sighed behind me. " _Jamal._ The _sign._ "

"The—Oh!" I hurtled down the stairs and ripped open the door—"Hi!" I exclaimed, a little more cheerily than necessary. Then I straightened up, glancing up and down and finally taking him in—blond mop of neat hair, glasses, dweeby grin… and _plaid._ God, why did it have to be plaid? "Um, are you here about the sign?"

The person who’d rung my doorbell blinked at me like a rabbit in the middle of a snowy highway. "Hm? Oh. Yeah! Er, you’re looking for a roommate—I—" He waffled around for a bit.

I stared over at the sign. For Rent. Then I looked back up at him. "…Wanna start with your name?"

"Nathan. Nathan Beaufort. Er—sorry, I was expecting a man."

Christ. This is what I got for having the name Jamal. "Learn to live with disappointment. You wanna see the room or not?"

"I suppose so. Er, is it alright? That I’m—"

"Male?"

"Yes."

I cast a despairing glance back at Johara, who was sitting about an inch above the stairs. "Be nice to him!" She indicated a smile with her hands. Oh great, she _liked_ him. She always did like the dweeby ones.

I looked back at him. "I’m gay. So it’s all good. Come on in."

"Oh. Um, yes! Yeah! Sure!"

I held the door open and couldn’t help a smirk. It only got wider as I saw Johara’s horrified look, and I let him go up the stairs in front of me, stifling a snort of laughter in my sleeve. He’d do. Especially if he could pay the rent on time. All the same, solving a murder was going to be a little harder with a roommate that twitchy.

Well, there was no point in getting ahead of myself. That would only matter if he took the room. 


	3. Unknown Variables

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this, as all, prevails.  
>  Assent, and you are sane;  
>  Demur, -- you're straightway dangerous,  
>  And handled with a chain.
> 
> -"Much Madness Is Divinest Sense", Emily Dickinson

My biggest problem with Nathan was that there wasn’t _anything_ obviously wrong with him. I didn’t trust it. He was shy, sure, and looked like a strong wind would knock him over, but I couldn’t figure out what a boy like him was… well… _doing_ here. There were plenty of apartments in this area, and the house I was in was a wreck, its peeling paint and collapsing balcony betraying a wistfulness for years long past. The hydro bills weren’t bad, and nothing had fallen down yet, but… Ah, who am I kidding? I was _convinced_ that you had to be running from the cops or escaping rich white suburbia to be trying to live _here._ Probably not the healthiest sentiment, but I don’t pretend to be at peace with my own issues.

And, I mean, I was technically doing both. So. Whatever.

"What’s the rent like?"

"Five hundred a month." I quietly closed the study door before he could get a glimpse at the disaster area—not that the rest of the house was a _great_ improvement, but the rest of it was mostly just…bare. "Kitchen, bathroom, and then this is your bedroom over here." I opened the door. Dustbunnies were still trying to breed on the hardwood floor, but the last tenant’s removal of the bed had exposed them to sunlight for the first time in years. I imagined I could hear them shrieking in misery.

"Oh! That’s bigger than I thought it would be."

I snorted and let him move past me into the room. He looked like an excitable kid. "I think it was two rooms at some point. The hardwood in the middle there looks all weird."

"Where’s your room?" he asked.

"Oh, it’s that one there." I jerked my thumb back at the closed study.

He raised an eyebrow in a sudden fit of skepticism. It didn’t look right on him. "Isn’t that your office?"

"What would make you think that?"

"The sign that says ‘Jamal Kaye, Private Investigations.’"

"Where does it say that?" I squawked, turning my head—Right. I’d leaned it up against the wall, even if I hadn’t put it up yet. "Oh. Never mind." I turned back to him. "Yes, it’s my office. What’s your point?"

"You’re sleeping in your office?"

"I’m conserving space," I retorted. "For five hundred a month, you come up with a better plan."

I saw the idea flash into his eyes. Even if I knew he wouldn’t say it.

"I don’t _care_ how big this bedroom is," I added, somewhat dourly. He gave me what he _probably_ thought was an innocent look, although the embarrassed flush on his face said more than that. Straight men. Gross.

"I like it here," he said after a moment.

"It’s a dumpster," I corrected him. Although it was a nice statement.

"It’s got _character._ "

" _God._ " I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, although I could feel a smile starting on my face. He did have a certain charm to him. 

Charm or not, though, he’d wasted my time. By the time I managed to kick him out and lock the door behind me, it was getting dark out. I didn’t admit to being _scared_ of anything, but that didn’t mean I was an idiot. If I wanted to scout LeBreton Flats, it had to be soon.

—

After Johara died, I started seeing them everywhere. And I _mean_ everywhere. I guess I’d blocked them out after a few years when I was little, but now, I saw them in in the supermarket. I saw them on the highway. I saw them clustered in groups on park benches, shivering in the foreverness of death under a blazing July sun. 

Death was everywhere. It hovered at my shoulder, it whispered in my ear, it followed me and it taunted my sister with its presence. I started seeing it in the eyes of people I knew. People I hated. People I didn’t.

So I ran. Maybe I couldn’t really outrun Death, but I was sure as hell gonna try.

Until she came to my door with sad eyes, a plea for help, and yet another ghost at her shoulder.

—-

There was a cab across the street, and I tucked my hands into my pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind as I sprinted across the road. The driver—I assumed they were the driver, anyway—was leaning against the blue Tennessy Willems mural, sucking on a cigarette with a distracted gaze upwards. They were Black, with distressed-denim trousers and a silver charm-bracelet on their wrist.

"Hey." I tried to grab their attention. "Hey, is this your car?"

"Hm?" They lowered their head and blinked at me. "Ah. Yes, she is,” they said, voice a rich contralto with just a hint of an accent on their vowels. “Looking for a ride?" They tucked a long, purple loc behind their ear, pushing themself off the blue wall.

"Yeah. LeBreton Flats?"

They took another drag on their cigarette. I got the sudden feeling that they were _laughing_ at me. He? I couldn’t tell—these days, I just didn’t assume, and the few friends I’d had in high school had taught me better. Besides, between the long purple hair and their slim, striped-shirted figure, there wasn’t much to draw from. 

"I can do that." They dropped their cigarette and squashed it under the heel of their boot, then leant down and carefully peeled the butt from the ground, dropping it delicately into the dumpster.

"Alright, hop on in."

They nodded at their cab, a sleek, dark Chrysler with a few dents and bruises along its side. I gathered it had seen better days, but as I climbed into the back seat, I noticed that the back had been reupholstered. I gave the cabbie another intrigued glance. It was my job to notice things about people—and I always made note of the interesting ones. 

"So, LeBreton Flats? Anywhere in particular?"

"Just drop me off in front of the museum, I guess."

Their hazelnut eyes appeared in the rearview mirror with a curious glance, but they kept their own counsel. "The War Museum it is. They’ll be closed by now."

"That’s alright." I leant back—and just managed to suppress my yelp of surprise as Johara appeared in the seat next to me. I kept my mouth shut. Thankfully.

"I’m sorry!" she cried out as she saw my face. "I didn’t want to miss out!"

I wondered if I could express ‘get back inside before I figure out how to whup your ectoplasmic ass’ through facial expressions. I couldn’t _say_ anything. Not with the driver up front.

Johara knew that perfectly well. Which meant she was doing this on _purpose._ "I’ll be useful! I can be your _spy._ "

I satisfied myself with a stony glare.

"Oh, come _on._ " She sighed in exasperation, grey ringlets bobbing. "I’m _fourteen._ I’m allowed to _do_ things. And besides, I can’t get hurt, I’m dead. You don’t need to be overprotective."

I pressed a hand over my mouth to stop the squawk of annoyance from bubbling upwards. Being dead didn’t mean she got to do anything she wanted!

Again, I got the horrible feeling that the driver was laughing at me. I hoped they weren’t watching me be ridiculous. I slouched down into the leather seat, then pulled my pad of paper out of my pocket. Three days. Gurjas had been missing for three days.

I flipped to a new page, chewed on the end of my pen, then wrote ‘GREENEYES’ in the middle, circling it for good measure. Mob boss? Ottawa wasn’t big on mafia, and whatever organized crime there was stayed out in suburbia hell, not downtown. Or maybe it was a descriptor. Green Eyes. Right. That meant a decent chunk of the human race.

From the corner of my eye, I caught the cab driver glancing back at me. I ignored them as best I could. They made me…not uncomfortable, exactly. But they kept giving me this slightly unnerving sense of _knowing._ It was probably just my paranoia acting up again—but if you assumed everybody was watching you, you ended up being right eventually.

I closed my pad, marking it with a thumb, and stared out the window, watching the river flow by with the refuse of early autumn. Then, a few moments later, the jagged roof of the War Museum came into view. We were on the Flats.

They pulled to a halt in front of the museum, and I leant forward to check the meter. It was dead and silent. "Hey, you didn’t…" I stared at it with suspicion, waiting for the catch.

They just gave me a crooked grin, dark eyes sparkling. "Just stay out of trouble, okay?" This time, I caught the hint of a French accent lingering under their words.

"Uh. Sure." I started to crawl back, but their hand flashed out to grab my arm —warm, gentle, but firmly and suddenly enough to make me freeze. I raised my eyes to meet theirs, and a lump of fear rose in my throat at the sudden steely fire I met there.

"I mean it. _Stay out of trouble._ "

I clawed at their hand, tearing it off of me. "I didn’t _ask_ you." I climbed out of the car, gave them one last look—and paused. They weren’t looking at me anymore. They were looking into the back seat, and right at Johara.

That was impossible. 

I slammed the door, and the impact reverberated through the entire cab. I watched them drive away and tried to make my heart rate slow down. Finally, I let myself look at Jo. Her eyes were wide, and even through her grey pallor, she was pale and drawn. "They looked at me."

"Jo—"

"They _looked at me,_ " she repeated insistently.

"That’s impossible."

"Why were they _looking at me?_ " she said again in a strangled voice.

I should have had something better to say. Instead, I shook my head. "Don’t worry about it." And I tried not to.

I had a body to find.


	4. The Ghosts of LeBreton

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I dreamed that one had died in a strange place  
> near no accustomed hand,  
> and they had nailed the boards above her face,  
> the peasants of that land...
> 
> ...and left her to the indifferent stars above  
> until I carved these words."
> 
> -A Dream of Death, William Butler Yeats

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: dead bodies, implied abuse

Let’s be perfectly clear here. There is nothing special about LeBreton Flats. There’s a museum about how we’ve learned to kill people the most efficiently through the years. In the summer, a bunch of sweaty preps get together and think they’re cultured because they watch pop stars pretend to be country singers. One time, a stage collapsed on some aging eighties band. That is the _extent_ of excitement in this neighborhood. Population: three-hundred-something.

You’d think Gurjas would have the decency to get killed somewhere _interesting._

Gurjas hadn’t had the decency to do much, though. He didn’t want to tell me anything useful, it appeared, and once I’d pulled the lying trick on him, I wouldn’t be able to trust anything _else_ he said. As a result, I was stuck with an entire neighborhood to canvass.

Still, I did know three very important things.

One. The home address Mrs. Chaudhury had given me was in Nepean—way, _way_ south of here.

Two. So was the Civic Hospital. I knew my bus routes. This led me to the inescapable, very, _very_ interesting Three—that whatever Gurjas had been doing here, he hadn’t been on his way home from work.

I pulled out my phone and managed to grab a decent map of LeBreton. At least he hadn’t gotten killed somewhere busy. LeBreton was mostly flatland and construction, which didn’t leave a lot of potential dumping grounds. Or a lot, depending on how you considered it, but if you didn’t want your murder victim coming up in pieces via bulldozer... "What do you think had him all the way out here?" I asked slyly.

Johara gave me a hurt look, clearly coming to the same conclusion I had—and rejecting it. "I’m sure he had a _good_ reason."

"Like a mistress."

"He _wouldn’t,"_ she pronounced with a glare.

I snorted and aimed my grin at the ground. "Aw. Jumping to his defense already." Jo had a soft spot for lost souls, dead or alive.

"He’s a nice man! He didn’t deserve what happened."

I paused at that. "Nobody does. Whether he had a mistress or not doesn’t change that." I sighed and glanced up at the construction zone next to the museum. The summer had been filled with all sorts of grand plans and ideas for what to do with the place. Libraries. Arenas. But all I could see was an empty stretch of torn-up earth, dead and wasted space, criss-crossed with tire-marks and withered grass. "Well, his body’s somewhere in here. Look for disturbed earth, anywhere where there might have been digging, stuff like that."

"Over all of _this?_ "

"Yeah. Get started." I gave her an amused glance. "Hey, _you_ wanted to come."

She drifted off without further comment, and I shook my head. Typical. I stepped out onto the broken field, and started taking measured paces, using my phone as a flashlight. It probably would have been easier during the day, but the construction workers would all be here during the day, and every other teenager playing hooky from school, and people in the museum… Besides, three days later, Gurjas probably wasn’t looking his best.

"Hello."

I licked my lips and tried to ignore the voice. I could see another ghost at the edge of my vision, oily silver with the kind of fuzzing around the edges that really old ghosts get. Like old Polaroids. If I pretended I couldn’t hear them, they’d go away. See, they can’t tell that I’m a medium until I acknowledge them. Sometimes ignoring your problems does work.

They drifted around me curiously as I kept my steady pace, searching for a sign. I nearly stuck my foot in a puddle, I was so focused on _not_ looking at them.

"I like your hair."

Why were they _talking_ to me? Were they so old and lonely that they were talking to everyone or—

"Don’t worry, she’s just crabby," Johara said cheerfully. "Jamal, she thinks she knows where—"

"Goddamit, Jo!" I burst out, circling on her. She recoiled, doe eyes blinking, but I wasn’t fooled. She knew _exactly_ what she was doing. "Twice? Twice in _one day?_ "

"You can’t just _ignore_ it!"

"I can do whatever the fuck I want, _thanks._ " I was so tempted to throw my phone at her, but it’s not like that would have done anything anyway. I ran my fingers through my hair and groaned in frustration—and, my secret having been spilled, turned my attention reluctantly to the _second_ ghost I’d had to deal with that day.

She was young. Older than me, but that didn’t mean much—I was practically a baby compared to most of the ghosts I ran into. I couldn’t imagine how long she’d been dead, though—the dress she had on was the kind of thing you saw in museums and ancient photographs, the wide collar almost hidden under the spill of her singed, pale hair. She was fat, too, which was weird with ghosts sometimes – you got used enough to all the movies with skinny perfect people wearing historical costumes that you forgot that it didn’t work that way.

I took a deep breath. "Okay, what was Jo talking about?"

The ghost blinked, translucent eyelashes long and fluttering against her patchy, age-stained cheek. "Are you looking for a body?"

I nodded, not trusting my voice. At least Gurjas had been recently dead. The older ghosts freaked me out on a completely different level. _How many years has she been here? Wandering around half-alive, waiting for somebody to keep her company?_ I pushed the thoughts away, but the existential terror refused to budge.

"He’s buried in the riverbank," she said quietly.

"The bank? Did you see what happened?"

She shook her head. "I saw the girl, though."

I paused, and my heart skipped a beat. Then I yanked my pad out of my pocket. "A girl?"

"Yes. There was a young girl with him – she got away.”

I stared at the white paper for a moment, then back up at her. "Okay, young girl is vague. Are you talking twenties, teenager, toddler?"

"I… I’m not sure. Eighteen? Nineteen? Maybe younger." She smiled softly. "Everybody looks young."

I swallowed. "Did she—seem scared?"

"A little. He wasn’t being rough with her, though. Was he her father?"

I took a deep breath. "No. No, I don’t think so." Gurjas’s daughter was six. Whoever he’d had with him, it hadn’t been Sulha Chaudhury. "Did you see where she went?"

"She ran off…that way." She pointed downtown. That wasn’t the most helpful direction, but I jotted it down anyway. "She was… thin, too thin. Not just thinner than me, the kind where you know she hasn’t been eating. Bones sticking out. And something wasn’t – _right._ ”

"That’s not exactly specific," I murmured. “Anything else?”

“Oh! She was – er, an immigrant? Not white? One of those?”

“One of-“ I sighed. “Anything specific?"

"Sorry, no."

Great. So all I had is that this girl wasn't white, and a reminder that old people were racist. I scribbled it down, reminding myself with tongue firmly stuffed between my teeth that she was over a hundred years old, white and dead. Still, though. 

"Take us to the bank where he is. We need that body."

The ghost nodded. I had the feeling I was being rude, and awkwardly, I added. "What’s your name?"

She paused, a photograph in the dark. Then she murmured, "I don’t remember. "

—

I first noticed the smell a few metres from the riverbank, and it only got worse as I got closer. Johara wasn’t bothered, and actually gave me a concerned look as I held the sleeve of my jean jacket to my nose. Of course. Ghosts couldn’t _smell_ things.

It was the smell of rotting meat. Our guide stopped, well back from the disturbed earth. I kept going. The turned soil was conspicuous if you were looking for it, too far back from the actual running water to be a consequence of the river.

I wondered if I should just call the police now. But a patch of dark ground wasn’t enough, even with the smell. I looked around, found a branch, and tried not to gag as I pulled my sleeve from my nose. Slowly, swallowing the bile rising up my throat, I started scraping the soil aside.

"Jamal, I’m scared," Johara whimpered quietly.

A snarky response bubbled in my head— _what did you think looking for a body would be like_ —but I pushed it away. "It’ll be okay. He’ll be at rest. We’re doing the—" I swallowed. "The right thing." I’d seen enough ghosts in various stages of decomposition. This couldn’t be any worse.

The stick hit something—and sank into it. My stomach roiled, and I threw myself away, emptying my stomach into the bushes. My head wouldn’t stop spinning, and Johara was crying softly behind me. "I don’t wanna look, Jamal, please, please—"

I closed my eyes. "Jo, you’re _dead._ And so is he. We’ve talked to him."

"It’s—it’s different."

"Yeah. It is."

I wiped my mouth, taking a shuddering breath. I shouldn’t be snapping at her. She had more reasons to be scared of death than I did. I didn’t even remember what she’d looked like after the car had hit her—it was buried deep in the back of my head where it couldn’t hurt me—but I had a feeling she did. I’d never asked her. We didn’t talk about it. Understandably enough, I felt.

I turned back to the grave and fought off another wave of hysterical nausea as I realized the branch was sticking straight up into the air. Poor Gurjas. I hoped it wasn’t his face. I took a hold of it, yanked it out—

I heard a breath behind me. There was somebody else living, there with me and the dead.


	5. Green Eyed Monster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "There was no redness on his woe-worn cheek,  
> No sunny smile upon his ashy lips"   
> -The Captive's Dream, Anne Bronte

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: casual ableism, paranoia, mind control, violence

The first thing I noticed about the woman standing behind me was that her eyes were fixed on me—not the grave I was halfway through digging up. She was dressed all in black, tall and slim and shadowy with ghostly pale skin.

"Well," she exhaled with a giddy smile spreading over her face and hands on her hips. "Who are you, then?"

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to answer that question. "Just passing through, ma’am. Don’t worry about it." Not the reaction I’d expected.

" _Ma’am._ God, you must be joking. Do I look that old?"

"Everybody looks old to me," I retorted before I could stop myself. She didn’t, though. She had sort of the eternally-twenty-nine thing going on—which I supposed wasn’t _young,_ either.

She laughed at that, and I watched her mouth uneasily. Her teeth looked a little… sharp. Maybe it was just the paranoia of being out alone in the middle of the night, chasing down a body. I figured that would put _anybody_ on edge.

Still—

"We haven’t met, right?" I found myself asking, ignoring the strange glance I got from Jo.

The stranger blinked at that, then she smiled again. "Why do you ask?" There was an odd edge to it, something that grated and caught and _hurt._

I just nodded, trying to keep my wariness hidden. "Anyway, I was on my way home. Sorry I disturbed you." I turned away and started walking back towards the main road, my heart still in my throat. _Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it._

Johara whispered—even though she didn’t need to—"J-Jamal? Why is she here?"

"I have some theories," I whispered back—

"Who are you talking to?" Her smooth voice cut through the quiet air, and I felt my shoulders stiffen. I listened to her footsteps coming up behind me. I was used to having my actions dissected and analyzed—cashiers in stores waiting for me to shoplift, teachers and students alike in school taking apart every word I spoke and wondering if it was a threat—but this was different. I couldn’t place exactly how. Maybe it wasn’t.

"Just myself. Can I go home now?"

"Hmm." She was right behind me now. I turned around to face her, a flash of irrational fear filling me as I craned my neck up. She was easily a head taller than me. That shouldn’t have concerned me so much. She might have been tall, but that just meant I had a lower centre of gravity. "Is it a ghost?"

My blood froze. I managed to force a smile which sat on my face semi-convincingly. "Haha. You’re funny. I dunno what drugs you’ve been smoking, but—"

"Don’t worry. I won’t tell anybody."

She was staring at me, not Johara. As I stood there, frozen, Jo moved her hand in between us, fingers trembling. The woman didn’t move a muscle. She couldn’t see Johara. Somehow, she just… knew.

_I won't tell anybody—don't tell anybody—_ I didn't like that phrase. It echoed around in my head in ways that felt a little bit too familiar, a little bit too dark.

Not that different. Not that different at all.

"Remember the cab driver?" Johara asked, although her voice was trembling. "Maybe we're not the only ones." Then I realized the tremble in her voice wasn't fear. It was excitement.

I didn't respond. I wasn't going to give up my secrets that fast. I shifted my feet, and stuck my hands in my pocket, staring resolutely up at the woman. "Tell anybody what?"

She grinned. I still didn't trust it, but maybe Jo was right. _Maybe_. My paranoia didn't like that word either. "You're Salt, aren't you?"

"...Is that a joke about me being bitter? Because I'm not following."

Her eyebrows flickered almost imperceptibly upwards. Shocked, but trying to hide it. "You don't know?"

"Don't know what?"

"Well..." she shrugged. It took me a few moments to realize she wasn't going to continue talking. Instead, her eyes flickered over me with a bemused interest, examining every inch of me. The out-of-place auburn hair, the baggy denim jacket, the bargain-bin clothes that were the only thing I felt comfortable wearing. I didn’t feel self-conscious about it most of the time, but under her eyes, my skin felt like it didn’t fit. I took a step backwards, and her gaze snapped back up to my face. "You're lying."  
  


My heart leapt into my throat. "About what?" 

"You're a Salt. I can feel it." She gave me a crooked smile, but her green eyes were flashing, desperation writ large. At least, it looked like desperation. It could just have easily been predatory glee.

I was missing something. Scratch that. I was missing everything. Whoever this was, she was working from a completely different context than me.

She took another step forward, a silver streak appearing in her hair. It must have been there before—I just couldn't see it in the dark—or at least that's what I told myself. "Come on. Just tell me about it."

"About—-" I couldn't keep playing innocent forever. And I was starting to think maybe lying wasn't going to get me out of this. But I barely believed it myself, that I was more than just crazy, and I didn't need other people in my business, because it was mine—

I pulled my switchblade out of my pocket, keeping my hands still even though all they wanted to do was tremble. I flicked it open and took a deep breath. "I think you need to back off now."

I expected her to get angry, or rude, or threaten to call the cops on me with the typical shaky fragility that white women usually used whenever things didn’t go their way. I didn't expect her face to fall, or there to be hurt in her eyes. She chuckled, although her eyes still held that sadness, and then shrugged. "You never used to be so paranoid. But yeah, I'll go."

She half-turned away, and then paused.

"Oh, and... Kiera."

"Kiera?"

"My name." She gave me something that was almost a smile, and then—she vanished. Like she'd never been here. Like nothing had happened at all.

I tried to swallow. My mouth was dry, heart pounding against my ribcage.

"Jamal? Are you okay?"

I nodded, mostly to make Jo feel better. I wasn't okay, but I needed to be. I didn't have the energy to not be okay. 

_You never used to be so paranoid._

I'd blocked out Johara's accident. There were entire pieces of my childhood missing, erased by trauma and willful forgetfulness. But for the first time in a long time, I started to think some of what was missing was coming back for me.

I pulled out my phone, but my hands were shaking so badly that I couldn't dial the number I wanted. Instead, I let myself sink to the ground before I fell, putting my head between my knees. _You never used to be so paranoid._

_You're a Salt._

What the fuck did that mean?

I took another deep breath, trying to ignore Jo's worried stare. Then I picked my phone up again, searching for the anonymous tip line. Finally, I gave up and just dialed the main number.

"Ottawa Police Station, how can I help—"

"There's a body," I interrupted. I had to keep it short. "LeBreton flats, by the river next to the War Museum. Something's tried to dig at it."

"A body? Who—"

I didn't let her ask who I was. "Buried. You should probably send a car out here or something." Then I hung up. That was plenty of information.

Which meant I had to get out of here. But I sat there for a little longer anyway, fighting away the unexplainable, sudden urge to cry.

—

When I got back to the main road outside the War Museum, the black Chrysler was there. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It made sense in a twisted, mean sort of way. Of course the fucking cab driver was back here. Or maybe I’d hallucinated the whole thing and I was walking in circles.

The door opened, and they stepped out, erasing any possibility that it was somebody else. This smelled rotten. Beyond rotten.

I sped up my pace— _you never used to be so paranoid—_ until I was striding towards them, fingers curling until I felt nails dig into my palm.

They gave me a smile—it looked too much like Kiera’s—and I came to a stop in front of them.

"How’d it go?"

"I stayed out of trouble," I snapped, and then without any more prelude, drove my fist into their face. There was a particular joy to watching tall people stumble, and this one ended up sprawled against the side of their cab, wincing and rotating their jaw. "Now tell me who the _fuck_ you are."

I drew back my fist, ready to hit them again if I had to. _YOU NEVER USED TO BE SO PARANOID—_ this was some sort of _trick,_ some sort of _joke,_ somebody was trying to hurt me and catch me off guard and I wasn’t going to let them—

They pushed against the car, straightening up with a hand pressed to their jaw. "There’s no need to be violent—"

I hit them again, this time in the stomach. Mostly on principle. I didn’t like condescension. (youneverusedtobesoparanoid paranoia keeps you out of TROUBLE stay out of TROUBLE)

"Jamal, _stop it!_ "

_I won’t tell anybody—_

_Don’t tell anybody._

"Fuck off, Jo." I snarled. "I don’t _need_ this bullshit." I glared at the driver, who hadn’t made a _single_ move in retaliation. I didn’t trust that. It just made me want to lash out again, get _some_ sort of response —

The whisper in the back of my head was so quiet that I barely realized it was there. _Stop._

Every muscle in my body froze, then my arms fell uselessly by my sides, like every bit of energy had been drained out of them. I still wanted to fight. I was still angry. The words were still ringing around my head, echoing louder and louder—but the whisper was stronger even than that. _Stop._ A simple command. My own head trying to be rational. Or—

Maybe I _was_ paranoid, but I wasn’t taking anything for granted right now. "What did you do to me?" I hissed.

The driver didn’t look terribly startled. That was not helping the paranoia. "Ah. That wasn't me."

I raised my fist again, considering the switchblade in my pocket with a level of seriousness. We were out in the open, but I could feel walls closing in on me anyway—

"Willow, that's enough," sighed the driver, although with a bit of thought I realized I'd probably winded them. Whoops.

"Willow?" I echoed. I could feel Jo glaring at me. I turned to her, and hissed under my breath, " _What_?"

She crossed her arms. "If you hadn't been so ready to pick a fight," she replied acidly, "you would have noticed there's somebody else here." She inclined her chin back towards the car.

I turned to look, rubbing my hands against my face. There was somebody else in the front seat. I stared at the silhouette in the dark window, confused, and then the window rolled down. The white girl inside poked her head through, 

_You done being an asshole now?_

"Will," the driver said again, exhaustion obvious in their voice as they glared down at the blonde. "Lose the gum."

The blonde chewed thoughtfully, then grinned at me. She looked a little like a fox, with high cheekbones and a pointy chin, strands falling from her blonde ponytail and framing her face. "Okay. You done being an asshole now?"

I blinked. Yeah. Okay. Reality was definitely coming apart a little. First strange women who knew me for some reason, spat out nonsense and vanished, and now I was hearing voices in my head, apparently. Well, that wasn't completely abnormal. But the voices weren't supposed to be _real_.

"To answer your question—" Willow glanced up at the driver, who was giving her a pretty annoyed look that I had no context for, " _out loud_ because I think Avery's mad at me, I'm Willow. This is Avery."

That did _not_ answer my qu—

"Okay, _yes_ , that doesn't actually answer your question—"

"Get out of my head!" I snapped. This was _not_ happening. I was not standing here getting psychoanalyzed or hypnotized or whatever by some stranger with an attitude—

The driver muttered something angrily in French, and Will shrugged. "It's not my fault she thinks so loud."

"This is some kind of trick, isn't it?" I snarled. Kiera's words were still dancing around my brain, one thought chasing another's tail in a neverending circle.

Will blinked, then sighed, shooting a look up at Avery. It was Avery, eventually, who answered me.

"You can talk to ghosts. Can't you?" they said softly.

I felt like _I'd_ been punched in the stomach. "Fuck off. Your _friend_ started getting at me for the same thing."

"Kiera isn't my friend."

"You fucking _knew_ —you _knew_ I was going to run into her?"

Avery shook their head. "It’s—" They pulled a face.

"You read my mind. Right."

"Not on purpose. It's like trying to block out a foghorn. Her name was right at the surface." They gave me a soft half-smile. "You’re, um, freaking out a bit."

"Is that supposed to make sense to me? How—how does any of this make sense?" My head was spinning more and more. I could hear police sirens in the background, and Will made a face that mirrored Avery’s annoyed expression as the blue and red lights started getting closer.

Avery smiled, brown eyes crinkling. I wondered how they could look at me like that after I'd tried beating them up. Hell, I'd even split their lip. I hadn't decided whether or not I felt bad or not yet. "You're not the only freak in Ottawa." They nodded their head at the Chrysler. "Want a ride? From one freak to another."

Inside my head, their voice echoed again—not the same kind of controlling whisper as before. Just an open message. _You're not alone._

"Fine." I slid into the back next to the blonde with the bubblegum—then stuck a finger into her face. "I’m not an asshole. Usually.”

Willow just grinned at me. "Don’t hit my best friend again and no harm done.”

I opened my mouth, searched for a response, and then settled for a grumbled sort-of-apology.

"That’ll do. Welcome to the club."


	6. Thinking Loudly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "And where is truth? On tombs? for such to thee  
>  Has been my heart."
> 
> \- Fragment: The Sepulchre of Memory, Percy Bysshe Shelley

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: reclaimed ableist language

If you were to ask me why I’d said yes, I’m not sure I’d have a coherent answer. I supposed the threat of running into that woman again scared me more than climbing into a car with two strangers promising me answers.

It was weird—I’d never really thought of _asking_ any of the questions that had apparently been rolling around in my head for the last decade or so. I just accepted my own peculiarity without a lot of insight or existential despair. Or at least, I thought I had.

"What happened to your curiosity?" Will teased from the other end of the passenger seat. I ignored her, staring out of the window instead and trying to look as aggressively passive-aggressive as possible. I wanted answers, but the prospect of actually _asking_ for them made me want to retch. Even being in a car with two people I didn’t trust as far as I could throw was pushing it.

Johara, on the other hand… "You should ask them, Jamal," she murmured, bizarrely innocent and trusting as ever. Or maybe she was just smarter than me. "Maybe they know what happened to Mr. Chaudhury."

"Mr. Chaudhury?" Will clicked her tongue. "I don’t know _that_ name, I’m afraid."

I turned my head slightly towards Will, hissing, "You’re reading my mind again." She could hear Jo. That just… No. That wasn’t _right._

"Technically, we’re not," Avery commented from the front seat. "We can hear Johara because you can, but it’s surface. We’d have to actively _not_ pay attention to ignore her."

That still sounded like mind-reading to me, but I kept my own counsel. Surface—they’d said that about Kiera’s name, too. Besides, I could hear Jo’s little gasp of excitement. She’d been stuck with just me for company for the last two years—I guess I couldn’t really deprive her of a little bit of conversation.

"Can—can you really hear me?" she asked in a quiet voice.

"Sure can. I can’t see you, but I bet you’re pretty."

Johara laughed at that, and I stifled my grumble behind pursed lips. Great. Now my dead fourteen-year-old sister was getting hit on. I was sure there was a ton of moral problems with that, but whatever. It made her smile.

I tried to ignore that conversation, and caught Avery’s eyes in the rearview mirror, dark and enigmatic. I tore my glance away and back out the window, but after gathering a little bit of courage, I thought, _I shouldn’t have hit you. Sorry._

_Ah, that’s alright. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. I think I give off the wrong signals._

I startled slightly at the response, then suddenly unsure what to do with my hands, put them in my lap. Okay. Thinking loudly apparently _worked._ I snuck a glance over at Will and Johara. "…Like an onion, really. Have you seen Shrek?" Yeah, I definitely wasn’t missing anything important. 

_Don’t worry about Will,_ Avery said—thought?—with a small chuckle out loud. _She means well._

_I’m not sure how much I trust ‘means well’ when it comes to mind control. Especially from a white kid._

_That’s fair. I can promise you that we only use it when we have to. And I’m working with her._

I thought about the command I’d gotten from Will, the little whispered word. Stop. Yeah. Yeah, that’d been fair. _So can I do any of that? Like, I’m talking to you like this now—_

 _That’s normal. You’re just thinking really loudly._ They laughed again, and I pulled a face in their general direction. Apparently they’d heard _that,_ too. _We all have our gifts._

_Who’s we? You seem to be in charge._

Avery shrugged. _Not exactly. More like Switzerland._ They paused with one hand on the wheel, poking their head into the backseat. "What are you telling that poor girl, Willow?"

"Oh, just about that time I got that guy’s wallet and turned out he had business cards from every adult store in Ottawa—"

" _Will._ "

She blinked. "What? She’s fourteen, not d—oh, well—"

I considered hitting her. Jo stifled a giggle, and I glared up at Avery. "What was that about only using the mind control thing when necessary?"

"I was homeless," Will protested. "And out of makeup. It was _totally_ necessary."

I hid my smile behind my hand.

"There’s lots of us," Avery said out loud, answering my question from earlier.

"And everybody can do different things?" The paranoia was still there, creeping around in the back of my head, but the curiosity had taken over. Fucking sue me, okay? Avery’s welcome mat message was still ringing in the back of my head— _you’re not alone—_ and as cheesy and Hallmark as it was, I was a foster kid. The concept was appealing, if not altogether trustworthy.

Will held up seven fingers. "There’s seven types. _Obviously,_ Sulfurs are the best—"

"—There are three celestial elements, and four core elements," Avery finished with a sigh, and Will huffed at being interrupted. "Sulfur, Salt and Mercury are celestial. And the core ones are Fire, Earth, Air and Water."

I looked over at Johara, who shrugged. "Don’t look at _me._ You’re the one who knows things."

"No, I fake knowing things. It’s different."

Will snorted. "Don’t worry, nobody cares about the core elements anyway."

"That’s not what you were saying when Laura singed your eyebrows," Avery commented dryly. "All seven elements are important."

"Is this some Last Airbender shit?"

"Not far off." Avery came to a stop, and I realized we were outside my house. "But as always, the truth is stranger and sadder and more complicated than fiction can ever be." They unlocked my door with a ‘click’ that sounded very final, but I could tell they weren’t quite done. "You’re a Salt elemental."

Elemental. That sounded a little Dungeons and Dragons to me. Then the rest of it clicked. "…That’s what Kiera was talking about?"

"Yes. With practice, we can recognize each other."

"See, I thought you clocked me because of Jo’s nonstop chattering—"

" _Hey!_ " Jo swatted ineffectually at me. Then she bit her lip, and finally managed to get out whatever had been on her mind throughout all this. "…How—how do you know?"

Avery tucked a purple loc behind their ear. "Know what?" they asked, although I had a sense they already knew.

Johara paused, then closed her eyes. I looked between her and Avery for a moment in confusion—then Avery nodded, and I realized it was a conversation I hadn’t been privy to. I supposed that was fair enough, but it didn’t stop the lump in my throat as I realized I wasn’t Jo’s one and only secret-keeper anymore.

"Well," I said, breaking the silence, "thanks for the ride." I let myself out. My head was feeling foggy again. I’d expected _something_ to happen, but this was… a lot. Too much information, too many people. I plodded across the road, over to the sidewalk—

"Hey, hold up!"

I stopped, and half-turned. Will had sprinted across the road, and now she stood over me with a smile on her too-wide mouth, blonde ponytail bobbing. She was taller than me—not that that was hard—and now that I was seeing her standing, she had the gracefulness of an overgrown giraffe. It was… charming, in a way I wasn’t used to.

"You’re not very old, are you?" I commented with a twist at the end of my lips.

"Neither are you. Aren’t you supposed to be in kindergarten or something?"

I chose not to rise to the bait. "What do you want?"

She plucked my pen from my pocket with a startling speed, and grabbed my hand, pushing up my jacket sleeve and scrawling a few numbers on my arm. "I know all this shit is weird as fuck and probably not what you wanted from today, but just in case you get curious or need help—"

“—from, what, you two chuckleheads?"

"Don’t push your luck." She tucked the pen behind her ear with a smirk. "The point being that you can reach me at that number. I don’t know. We can go out for coffee or something." She paused for a moment then added, her smirk softening into something else, "Having somebody to talk to helped me a lot. So. Yeah."

I looked at the numbers that she’d written upside-down on my skin. "I thought I was an asshole."

"Eh, we all are. Crazies gotta stick together, right?"

"I’m not crazy."

She gave me a lopsided grin, blue eyes twinkling. "That’s what we all say." Then she turned and left, waving a goodbye over her shoulder. "Ta!"

Ta. How _pretentious._ Still, I couldn’t help but smile. Maybe— _maybe—_ I’d take her up on it.

If nothing else, I had to get my pen back.


	7. Pretending to be Normal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm nobody! Who are you?  
> Are you nobody, too?  
> Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
> 
> -"I'm Nobody! Who Are You?", Emily Dickinson

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: child abandonment, smoking, paranoia

The Civic Hospital emergency room is dressed in beige, white and blue, and the lights above flicker, desperately trying to provide light and warmth to a room that's absorbed the unhappiness, misery and pain of countless people. Hospitals try so hard to be something other than they are. I can't fault them. We all do it.

I can't decide whether I’m dreaming or not. I can't feel my feet against the floor, or the air against my hands, even though I know I _should._ One moment I think I'm seventeen and fully-grown and too, too aware of all the things I'm here to find out. The next moment, I'm fifteen, and my sister's dying. And then I'm twelve again and Johara's next to me, small and nervous and wondering why we're here.

My brain skips the part where the nurse comes up to us and asks if we're lost and guides us elsewhere in the hospital. I vaguely remember how she found somebody to keep us company, concern mixed with a desire to help. Instead, my dream keeps us in the emergency room.

A baby starts crying. I turn around, and I can't see Jo next to me, even though I can feel her chubby hand in mine, sweaty and sticky—and between the automatic glass doors, I can see the little girl, in a borrowed coat too big for her and somebody else’s name stitched inside. She's maybe three, four years old. The baby in her arms is too big for her, sliding out of her arms. She's small and brown and dirty, and somebody's tried to cut her red hair short so it sticks out at angles from her head.

The baby won't stop crying. "You have to be quiet!" she insists. "Mama said she's coming back soon!"

There's somebody walking away from the hospital, a black windbreaker wrapped tightly around her thin frame. I don't know if she's my mother. But I find myself running anyway, hand stretched out, because I'm so close, so close this time. All I need is to see her _face._

I cross the space between her and me in a single step. My hand brushes against her shoulder, but then suddenly I'm holding an empty raincoat in my hand. I stare at it. I look up again. The parking lot is full of ghosts, grey and misty.  
  


Nothing but smoke and ashes.

Again.

\----

I'd never woken up from nightmares with that catapult terror that you saw in movies or TV. Instead, every time, my eyes snap open, and I think I'm somewhere else for however long it takes for my nerves to unwind and my muscles to relax. It's always been like that, and this time, it wasn't any different.

"Jamal?" Jo sat cross-legged in front of me, the pose making her look a lot more solid than she really was. It helped.

"Mm. Hi." I managed to move my hand up to the pillow, fingers digging into the soft fabric. The blanket below me wasn't doing a lot to soften the hardwood below me. That was alright. It was helping me wake up faster.

"Which one was it this time?"

"Oh, just..." I shrugged. "The hospital."

Even in the dark, I could see how her eyes softened. "Any idea why?"

I snorted. "Could ask that about a lot of things." I sat up with a groan. "Can you get the light?"

"I can't, sorry."

"Right." Two years and I still found myself forgetting she was—Yeah. I didn't want to think about that right now. I considered getting up, but then decided just to sit in the dark for a while. The dark didn't bother me. Not most of the time, anyway.

"Are you going to be okay?"

"Yeah," I lied, or almost lied. I didn't really know what 'okay' meant. Did it mean back to normal? Did it mean up to everybody else's standards of normal? Did it mean having fifty percent less nightmares than normal? No nightmares at all?

I suddenly had the urge to cry. That _was_ unusual. I managed to shove it away, and finally grabbed hold of one of the surrounding boxes, hauling myself to my feet and switching on the light. It was brighter than I expected, and I squinted, covering my eyes.  
  


"You're going to have to sleep in more than a t-shirt when Nathan moves in, you know," Jo added brightly. I scratched my stomach in response.

My notepad from yesterday was sitting on the desk, and I stared at it for a few moments, letting the events of the previous day sink in. It hadn't really occurred to me at the time just how much had happened, or how much of it had been weird as _hell._

I picked up the pad, flicking through it and pausing at the last page. "Core—Celestial?" was scrawled on it, with "Fire, Earth, Air, Water" scrawled underneath Core, and "Sulfur, Mercury" scribbled underneath Celestial. At the bottom, in big and uncertain letters, was 'SALT.'

Me. That was me. At least, according to two mind-readers with hidden agendas and a disturbing Trinity cosplayer with a vanishing act. The worst part was, it was more information than I had about myself currently.

Fueled by either nostalgia or self-destructiveness, I opened the top drawer of the desk and pulled out the very first thing I'd put in there. Jo was hovering a distance away, but she didn't need to come closer. She knew what it was. The two of us had taken ourselves to the hospital one day five years ago.

I snorted. We'd been so excited.

I opened the folder. Two pieces of paper sat nestled inside. I knew their contents mostly off by heart.

K., Jamal.   
  


Date of birth: unknown.

Ethnicity: Unknown.

Age: three, probably. Same for Johara, except she’d been a six-month-old baby.

There’d been a lot of guesses made as to where we were _from,_ especially since white people couldn’t hide their fascination with Jo’s hair (soft, bouncy ringlets that had a life of their own). As far as I had figured, Jo was part Black, part… something else. Probably the same whatever I was. That was the problem. Jo had her hair and her nose—even on top of light brown skin, people made their assumptions. And with me, well, nobody even got that far. Brown kids didn’t have red hair, and whether I was Middle-Eastern or Indian or Mexican or Native American—none of that mattered when ‘terrorist’ or ‘illegal’ summed up people’s feelings about me pretty neatly.

All of that—all the guesswork, all the desperate searching of our faces for phenotypes and stereotypes we could turn into something understandable—boiled down into less than half of a page.

Still, I found myself scanning the piece of paper, searching for some missing clue, some extra hint. I thought I'd grown out of it, but that one extra word— _salt—_ felt like another arrow. I scoffed at myself. Not so much an arrow as a compass needle, spinning endlessly, pointing nowhere at all. I shoved the folder back into the drawer, probably more roughly than I meant to. I was _over_ it.

Instead, I copied down the number from my arm (a little faded now) onto my pad of paper. After a moment, I dropped the pad into the drawer as well. I'd found Mr. Chaudhury. My job was done.

Speaking of... I glanced over at the clock. 5:30. Too early, still. But I imagined within the next few hours it'd be time to give Mrs. Chaudhury a call.

In the meantime—

"You're not _done,_ are you?"

I didn't bother meeting Jo's eyes. She'd be all flamed up and righteous and accusatory. "I did what she wanted me to do. _And_ what Gurjas wanted. You'll notice he's not here."

"But somebody _killed_ him! And—what was all that yesterday?"

I paused, not sure what I wanted to say. Despite myself, I looked up—and in her face, I could see the same desperate need for identity written in block letters, on the slightly oversized nose we both had, the high cheekbones, the widow's peak hairline.

"Don't you want to _know?_ Aren't you curious at all?"

I did. "And what if it's a trick, or a trap, or too big for me to handle?"

  
"Us."

"What?"

  
"For _us_ to handle," she said insistently.

The anger surged up inside me out of nowhere. It wasn't worth yelling at her. It wouldn't solve anything or make the dark bubbling cloud in my chest go away.

"I'm going for a smoke," I snapped, grabbing a pair of plaid pants from the top of another box and yanking my box of smokes from the top of the desk.

I went down the stairs and outside, sitting down on the wooden steps and listening to them creak reassuringly underneath me. The house was old, but that wasn’t saying much—this was the corner of Hintonburg that had escaped the yuppie renos of the rest of this part of Ottawa. With the sun rising behind me, the street was bathed in the half-light of dawn, grey and slightly misty. It’d clear later. The autumn mornings always felt like oncoming storms.

I flicked open my cigarette case. Three left, and then I’d have to buy more. With money I didn’t have. The cash Mrs. Chaudhury had given me was going towards next month’s rent. The business I expected to drum up sometime between now and then would pay for food, and until then I was living off the cans and ramen my last foster family had given me as a gesture of goodwill. The boxes in my office were things they’d been trying to get rid of or the things I’d managed to hold onto, some donations from people I’d actually managed to learn the names of in school…

I glared at the three cigarettes as if I could conjure a fourth one into existence. Then I closed the case, and rested my head on the banister, eyelids burning with exhaustion and frustration. I had to call them, at some point. My old foster family, and the people at school I didn’t talk to anymore—everyone who had helped, sort of. They hadn’t been terrible. I just couldn’t work up the energy to talk to people I never had anything in common with. I missed them, sometimes, but not enough to get over the sinking feeling that they’d be happier now that I was gone.

I didn’t fall asleep, not exactly. But whatever trance I was in was disturbed by my phone vibrating in my hands. A text, labelled "Nathan Beaufort."

Right. Between the murder, the psychics, and fighting with Jo, I’d forgotten about that guy. Another perfectly nice person I didn’t understand. I opened the message.

  
  


N: Hey! The lnadlord says its all good and I can move in this week! Is Thursday good?

N: *landlord

God. Another person to keep track of.

J: yeah sure  
J: dont touch my shit  
N: Are you not going to be there? :questioning:

What _was_ a good way to answer that? Nathan was clearly a bit skittish, but I wasn’t sure if he was ready for "socializing makes me want to kill myself," let alone "that’s ironic, because I can talk to dead people."

Which brought me full circle back to Jo. Great. Thanks, brain.

J: i have an inconsistent schedule  
J: dont worry about it

_It would have been great if I was the ghost and not Jo,_ I grumbled to myself, probably a little more morosely than the situation really warranted. All Jo wanted was to talk to people, and all I wanted was to be left alone. Instead, I got stuck being the one who had to deal with everything.

I dialed Mrs. Chaudhury’s number into my phone anyway. Best to get it over with.

"… _Hello?_ " Right away, I could hear that she’d been crying, although she was doing her best to hide it.

I took a deep breath. "Mrs. Chaudhury. It’s Jamal, Jamal Kaye."

_"Yes, of course. The, um…"_ She paused. _"The police were here last night. Thank you."_

_Thank you?_ I’d been expecting screaming. Or coldness. I opened my mouth, trying to figure out how to respond—"I’m sorry. I—I’m sorry. For your loss."

_"You don’t need to apologize. You aren’t—"_ She sighed. _"You did what you promised. You took my desperate hope and you followed through, and that’s more than I should have asked of any child."_

"Child? Listen—"

_"Don’t start,"_ she chuckled wearily. _"Will you come to his funeral, Jamal? I would be honoured to have you there."_

Now that I _really_ didn’t have a response for. I wondered where on earth Gurjas had hopped off to—I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should ask _his_ permission.

Then I caught sight of the figure walking down the street towards me, and my blood ran cold. "…I’d like to think about it, if that’s alright. I’m sorry, Mrs. Chaudhury, I have to go."

_"Oh, that’s alright. Have a good day."_

"Yeah. You too." I hung up.  
  


Mrs. Chaudhury stood in front of me, eyes dark and her hands empty. "Hello, Jamal."


	8. The Stranger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "We must not look at goblin men,   
> We must not buy their fruits:   
> Who knows upon what soil they fed   
> Their hungry thirsty roots?" 
> 
> -Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: paranoia, unreality, manipulation

Whoever was standing in front of me, it wasn’t Mrs. Chaudhury. But as I looked at her, my mind struggling to erase the paradox and reassert some sort of reality, I couldn’t place exactly why I was so certain. Perhaps she had an earpiece in. Perhaps I’d hallucinated the phone call. Perhaps I’d just lost some time in there.

Or perhaps I just needed to accept what Will and Avery had been trying to tell me yesterday—that the world was darker and stranger and more uncertain than I knew. Not that it’d been particularly bright to begin with.

"Mrs. Chaudhury," I said after a while, trying to sound normal.

"Miss Kaye," she replied. I made a mental note of that. In the phone call, she’d called me _Jamal._ Even if I’d made up the phone call, I didn’t trust anybody who called me Miss. "I just wanted to stop by and thank you." She was too calm—too put together. Even the sadness in her voice had a fake undertone to it.  
  


On the other hand, I’ve been accused of being paranoid before. I tried to push my discomfort aside. "Don’t worry about it. A job’s a job." The fact that it was my _first_ actual PI gig didn’t matter, not when my heart was trying to crawl its way out of my throat.

"May I speak to you inside?"

_Oh hell no._ I didn’t know who—or what—was standing in front of me, but I didn’t want them in my space. I’d finally gotten a place of my own. I didn’t want them—her?—tainting it. I shrugged. "It’s nice out. Also it’s still a disaster in there."

Was I imagining the flash of uncertainty crossing Mrs. Chaudhury’s face? I couldn’t shake the feeling that the person in front of me had never been inside my apartment before. But—I _couldn’t_ trust my own mind. I couldn’t trust the impulses that told me that everybody was a danger, everybody was a threat, everybody was trying to hurt me. What I’d done to Avery still lingered on my conscience, even if they’d brushed it off as doing no lasting damage.

"Well, I suppose." She sat down next to me on the steps, a little too close. "The police came and talked to me this morning."

_This morning?_ I checked my phone. It was nearly seven—so it probably wasn't too early for the police to have visited this morning instead of last night, but I had my doubts. Besides—where were her kids? They couldn't be at school yet.

And this was all assuming that I'd made up the phone call out of thin air.

Anyway—"I figured they had." I tried to keep it as vague as possible, fishing for information. "What'd they say?"

She shrugged. It was an oddly young gesture on her—she wasn't old by any means, but old enough not to have the body language of a gangly teenager. I briefly wondered if Willow was behind this, but my own feelings aside, from what I understood, Will's power couldn't let her do something like this.

_You don't know anything about it. Perhaps this is Mrs. Chaudhury, with Willow at the wheel. Perhaps it's Willow sitting there next to you, and it's only your mind that's being controlled. You see what she wants you to see—_

I dragged myself out of it, my heart racing. It was too easy to find possibilities branching off of possibilities. It never ended, unless you forced yourself to look away.

She was talking. "It looks like he was murdered," she said with a sigh, and this time, the tear that fell down her cheek felt real. I wondered what the impostor next to me was really crying over—

_—J_ _amal stop it she's mourning her husband everybody mourns differently—-_

_—blue scrubs stained with red you bit them don’t you remember that—_

"I—they told me there's no way to know. That it could have been a random mugging—it could have been anything. There's so few murders in Ottawa you think they would spare the time, but..." She shrugged. "Nobody cares about us."

_Nobody cares about us._

That part was real.  
  


I was so sure, so sure she was a fake. Too many pieces didn't add up. But—but—ugh, I couldn't make myself be certain of anything. Every time I tried, scattered images from my dream flashed across the back of my mind—the weight of Johara in my arms, the sound of the black windbreaker fluttering in the breeze, wrapped tightly around somebody walking away.

_Nobody cares about us._

I had the distinct sense that I was being manipulated. But I pulled out one of my three cigarettes and my lighter anyway. "What are you saying, then?" I asked, even though I knew exactly what she was asking of me.

"I want you to find his murderer."

I flicked my lighter on and held it to the end of my cigarette, steadfastly refusing to look at her. "That all?" I couldn't help the sarcasm. "I'm a teenager with computer skills and too much time on her hands."

"You're talented. And I don't know how, but you found him. I trust you."

"I'm still charging you even if you butter me up."

She laughed at that. There was an edge to it, and it was both familiar and more than a little uncomfortable. "I brought plenty of money. Don't worry."

"I didn't say yes, yet."

"You’re going to. I can see it in your eyes."

I gave in, and looked up at her, the smoke from my cigarette drifting uselessly into the air. Her eyes were a vivid green against her dark skin, and I couldn’t figure out why I was _noticing._ "Yeah, what the hell. I’ll give it a shot. But if I get stabbed, it’s officially your fault."

She snorted at that, and smirked. Again, it looked out of place on Mrs. Chaudhury’s face, below the black headscarf. "Try not getting stabbed, then." She pushed the canvas bag from her shoulder, then over to me. "That should be enough, if I remember your rates correctly."

Shit. If she wasn’t Mrs. Chaudhury then how—Well, okay. I had a Facebook page. That one wasn’t exactly a challenge to figure out. I peered into the bag and tried not to choke. Okay. So that was rent taken care of, and money to actually buy _food._ The littlest things make you happy when you’re dirt poor.

"I should head off." She got to her feet, again with that long-limbed gracefulness—

"Wait."

"Yes?" She turned to look at me.

I took a long drag on my cigarette, then tapped the ash off on the banister. "What’s your name?" I asked.

"I don’t—"

I didn’t bother looking at her. "Out with it."

"I hired you. That’s all you need to know."

"Mmhm. Any chance you’ll tell me why?"

She just gave me another enigmatic smile, then walked off into the misty horizon, turning the corner on Wellington Street and vanishing from sight. I kept my eyes on her until she was out of view. Perhaps it was my stubbornness.

But the moment I could be sure she was gone, I dove back into the house, trying not to let the sudden panic in my chest speed up my pace. I locked the door behind me with an exaggerated slowness, and I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking.

Johara met me at the top of the stairs. "Gurjas came back! He wanted to—"

"Give me a moment," I mumbled, ducking into the bathroom. I felt so nauseous, but as much as my stomach roiled, I managed to keep it together. Instead, I turned on the tap and stuck my head underneath it, cold water rushing over me and clearing my head. Mostly. Not really. I was here, and somewhere else, and deep in the past, a thousand places at once.

"Jamal?"

I took my time responding, wiping the water from my face. "Jo. Yeah. I’m—" How did I even begin to explain what had just happened? "I have a new case," I settled on, with a breathlessness I couldn’t make go away. "Give me a minute."

I ducked into my office, ignoring Gurjas’s ghost and mentally filing him away in ‘deal with later.’ Then I picked up my phone, sorting through the papers I’d left, then giving up and just staring at the faded numbers on my arm. It rang, and rang, and rang, until I was ready to throw it against the wall.

"… _Willow Moray, who’s this?_ "

I took a deep breath. "…Will. I think I need your help." I raised my eyes to Gurjas. He stared back at me in silence, and while I’d been pretty certain that I wasn’t making things up, the look in his eyes—the sad confusion hiding behind the cold mask he kept putting up—was what sold it for me.

Whoever had come to see me today, it had not been Chandra Chaudhury, because Chandra Chaudhury’s husband was dead, and her impostor didn’t know what grief looked like.


	9. Once More For Clarity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> O thou God of old,  
> Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these!  
> But so much patience as a blade of grass. 
> 
> -Patience Taught By Nature, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: mild violence

"Help?" Will echoed, her voice slightly slurred. She cleared her throat. "Who is this? Like, great opening, but I just woke up, man."

I closed my eyes, sat down on my desk chair, and rubbed my temple in frustration. "…Jamal? Jamal Kaye?"

"…Yeah, not ringing a bell. Are you a telemarketer?"

Wow. I mean, I was too busy being furious to be scared anymore, which was a step up. "Are you actually this stupid or am I going to have to go hit somebody again—"

"Cool it, cool it," she laughed. "Okay, you’re the cutie from last night."

I groaned and lowered my forehead to my desk. "Don’t say it like that. God, even when you’re on the _phone_ you’re fucking with my head." Beat. "You, uh. You can’t read minds through the phone, right…?"

"If I say yes, can I keep screwing with you—?"

"This is kind of serious."

Will cleared her throat again. "Sorry. Yep. So you’re not calling me for a date?"

"I— _No!_ " I debated hanging up, and—just barely—managed to resist. Apparently she was even _more_ annoying during daylight hours. "I—you—you and Avery were talking about a lot of things last night. And…" I trailed off. Words were hard.

"You want the proper welcome wagon."

"No! I’m not joining your secret society!"

She snorted. "It’s not a secret society. For one, we don’t have a handshake."

"I just want to know what the fuck is going on. Can you meet me somewhere? There’s a Starbucks over on Wellington or something—"

"No offense, but I’d rather stay private. You live near Wellington, right?"

I hadn’t decided whether to _be_ offended or not. _"_ Yes. Is that a problem?"

"Yeeeeah… You’re stuck in the _hipster_ neighborhood."

I was suddenly very aware that I could see the Elmvale Oyster House from my window. "I don’t know what you’re talking about," I replied, probably unconvincingly. "That’s—that’s not the point." I was _so_ glad she was taking this seriously. "I don’t particularly want you in my _house._ "

"Isn’t your house your office? ‘Jamal Kaye, Prvate Investigator—"

"Are you—did you _google me?_ "

"It’s a nice Facebook page. Very professional looking. You need some testimonials, though. Like, ‘she found my neighbor’s cat so quickly, ten out of ten!’"

I pinched the bridge of my nose, and turned around, catching Gurjas’s eye. Gurjas. Right. There was a point to all this. "Just get your ass over here," I grumbled. I hung up on her with a cathartic click (although it wasn’t _nearly_ as good as slamming down the landline at my old house) then glared at Johara and Gurjas, who were studiously looking anywhere but at me. "What? What are you looking at?"

"Nothing," Johara said in an oddly squeaky voice.

The phone rang again. I picked it up—

"Where do you live, genius? Wellington’s a long-ass street, and it was dark last night."

I stared at my feet, then gave her my address with a grumble. Which wasn’t even _on_ Wellington.

_Then_ I hung up. I wasn’t going to be denied the last word.

—

Will showed up more than half an hour later, and my first sign of her was a cheerful "Knock knock!" from outside. I groaned, and went to let her in—

"Are you sure about this?"

I glanced over at Gurjas. It was the first time he’d spoken in a while, and I’d forgotten how gravelly his voice was. "…No. But I’m not sure of anything."

"You don’t have to get involved anymore." He sounded almost… embarrassed? "I—came to thank you. But you should move on."

I gave him a smile that was almost genuine. "So should you. But I don’t think either of us can do that without answers."

He glowered at me. "I have all the answers I need. I don’t want you dying in search of yours."

"Suit yourself. I’m stubborn, I’m curious and I’m stupid. It’s a terrible combination." I would have probably brushed off the ‘dying’ thing a little more if he wasn’t, well, floating in front of me all _dead_ as a warning sign. All the same, it didn’t deter me quite as much as it should have. Concern for my own skin was maybe… four, five on my priority list?

I went downstairs and opened the door.

"There you are. I thought you were going to keep me waiting." Will pushed her way inside, handing me one of the fountain drinks she was holding. "I got you a soda."

"…Uh. Okay." I took it, eyeing the Subway logo, and glanced up at her. She was a little less intimidating in daylight, I had to say—I could see the pink streaks in her hair, and the butterflies in her earlobes. She hadn’t gotten any less frustratingly _tall,_ but that was life as a hobbit. "Uh—" I just pointed upstairs. I wasn’t entirely sure how to open the conversation.

She snorted and climbed the stairs. "Enjoy the view."

"The—Oh, for—" She was wearing a miniskirt, black with lace on the bottom. "I don’t _do_ that."

"What, appreciate nice legs?"

…They _were_ nice legs, I had to admit. Aesthetically. But not the point. "I meant ogling people randomly," I mumbled, but she probably didn’t hear it.

"Ooooh, pretty skirt!" commented Johara from above, and I glared up at her.

"Thank you!"

Great. I’d forgotten. Jo wasn’t just my own personal heckler anymore. I grumbled something incoherently to myself, then followed Will upstairs…then grabbed her before she could go exploring the rest of the house.

"Office is _this_ way."

“But—"

"My roommate isn’t even moved in yet."

"Is she cute?"

"He’s tall, awkward and otherwise a total blank. Please stop asking me questions."

Will took a sip of her soda, but it didn’t hide the little smirk on her face. I just pushed her towards my office with a huff.

"Wow, this place is a shithole. I thought _my_ apartment was bad—"

"I don’t remember asking for your opinion."

"Technically, you invited me."

I was already getting a headache. "I haven’t even _unpacked._ Can I get the home reno commentary once I’ve actually settled in?"  
  


"Fine, fine." She waved her hand. "So what do you need?"

I sat down at my desk and opened my computer, glaring at her a little over the top of the screen. She was so… _chipper._ But I hadn’t forgotten what kind of abilities she had.

I pulled up the image I needed. It was one from Facebook, nice and clear. "This is Gurjas Chaudhury. I found his body in the Lebreton Flats yesterday." I turned the computer over to Will—and oh, I could see the look on her face. Instant recognition. "You know him?" I asked. I might not have been a mind-reader but the change in mood was obvious.

"Uh—only in passing. How’d you get involved?" It wasn’t a denial. She was too smart for that. But her hand strayed up her arm anyway, fiddling with the sleeve of her t-shirt in sudden discomfort.

"I'm a private investigator-"

"You’re seventeen. Don’t get cute with me." There was a rough edge to her voice. "You’re supposed to be chasing down lost bikes and investigating shoplifted candy bars."

"Well, I got stuck with this instead. Are you going to start giving me answers?" She’d probably plucked my age from my head at some point. I wasn’t particularly comfortable with that, either.

"I don’t _have_ any. I thought you wanted the welcome wagon."

"I told you, I don’t give a toss about your secret society. All I want to know is which of you fucks can disguise yourselves as other people."

Will froze, blue eyes wide. Then her mouth twisted into a humourless smile. I’d hit a nerve. "Right. That'd be Mercuries. They're the shapeshifters."

"Shapeshifters." I kept my voice steady, even as i felt my heart beat a sudden taboo against my ribs, quaking and frightened. At least she’d answered me.

"I can feel you freaking out—"

I slammed my hand against the desk and was both gratified and ashamed to see the way she jumped in her chair. She was paying attention now, at least. "How do I keep you the _fuck_ out of my head?"

"By keeping that temper of yours in check," she drawled, deliberately too cool, too calm.

Temper. Right. "I’m surrounded by cryptic assholes who think straight answers are too much work. I’ll calm down when I feel like it."

"If it’s any comfort, nothing about me is straight."

The line took me enough by surprise that I laughed, although it was abrupt and bitter. I buried my hand in my hair, covering my eyes and trying to let the new information settle in. Shapeshifters. Fucking hell. Whoever was commissioning me to keep investigating Gurjas’s murder had taken Mrs. Chaudhury’s form – what, just to screw with me? It was hard not to feel that way, let alone wonder whether or not it’d been the real Mrs. Chaudhury who had hired me the first time. It had to be. It was the only way any of this made sense. I’d been talking to two versions of her at once. "Okay," I breathed. "So shapeshifters, mind readers, and... whatever I am."

"A medium?"

"I’m not using that word."

"Shame. Loud weirdo talking to dead people is _such_ a mouthful."

Johara snorted in laughter behind me, and I wouldn’t have minded so much if I didn’t know perfectly well that Will could hear her too. "Laugh all you want," I shot back at her, "She’s sassing you too."

"Yeah, but it’s funny."

"One day I’ll make you _pay_ for how much you stab me in the back." I sighed and pushed the palm of my hand into my eyes, wondering if I should tell Will about the shapeshifter. "Okay. So—rewind. You know Gurjas."

At the sound of his name, Gurjas drifted curiously through the wall—and blanched, as much as a ghost _could._ It was confirmation that Will wasn’t just talking out of her ass. They _knew_ each other. I didn’t acknowledge him, and if he didn’t say anything…well, I didn’t know how this stuff worked. But I could pay attention.

"Only in passing," Will repeated, showing no awareness that Gurjas was there. "He’s out in Nepean area. Bayshore? I dunno. Avery and I kind of go everywhere." She scratched at her ear, obviously uncomfortable.

"You and Avery? Are you two—" I wiggled my hand awkwardly, trying to find the right word.

"God, no." Will pulled a face, then laughed, the tension falling from her shoulders. "What, are you jealous?"

" _No._ I was just asking."

She snorted, then pulled some of her hair out of her face where it had fallen out of her ponytail, a sad smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. "I was hoping he was okay. I guess not."

Gurjas still hadn’t said anything, but his stony masquerade was starting to falter. I wondered if he’d let himself even _think_ about being dead yet, or if this was the first time it’d started to sink in. Then—

"You make it sound like he was in danger."

Will _definitely_ twitched that time. But I must have let too much slide, and I still didn’t know how to lock down my head completely. "Are _you_ in danger?" she answered my question with one of her own.

"You sound so concerned."

"If you are it’s probably your own fault, so I’m not sure concerned is the right word." She tightened her ponytail with a smirk. "You seem to throw yourself into stupid situations."

"You’ve met me _once._ "

"Yes, and you were punching my mentor in the face."

"I don’t know if I _regret_ that."

"Yes, you do."

I—just barely—resisted the urge to slam the desk again. "This isn’t going anywhere if you don’t tell me how to _stop you doing that._ "

She blinked, then shrugged. "I’m sorry." It sounded _mostly_ sincere. "Avery has an easier time just not picking things up."

"What does that mean?"

"Do you actually want to know or is this step two of your weird ass-backwards interrogation style?"

…Dammit. I wished I had a defense against the interrogation thing. "I do actually want to know." I left out the part where knowledge was power and/or a defense against whatever bullshit was coming my way.

"Avery and I can _do_ the same thing, but we do it differently." She was still fidgeting with her hair, and I stuck my hand between my knees to stop myself from drumming my fingers on the desk. She was nervous enough. "Avery senses things, like… tendrils? That’s how they described it last time. They pick up on things but it’s easier for them to ignore things, although that came with practice."

"Tendrils. That’s not creepy."

"Look, describing brain shit is hard. You try it sometime, see how far you get."

"And you?"

"I actually _hear_ things. I can’t _stop_ myself from hearing whatever’s rattling around people’s heads. It’s not like I dig for it. It’s just… there. As obvious as your voice. Just quieter." Her eyes flicked downwards, staring at the ground in a sudden display of genuine shyness. It was weird, seeing an actual person peeking out from behind the glitter-coated bravado. "I really don’t mean to hear. It’s just hard not to. I’ve been working on it for a while and if I make jokes about it, it usually puts people a little more at ease."

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. "That’s… frightening. Can you tell the difference?"

"Pft, yeah. It’s not _identical."_

"So how do I keep you out?"

"You have to think of something consistently. Like a brick wall, or a nursery rhyme. My ex used lines of poetry."  
  


Well, there was only one option for _that. Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down—_

"…Really?" Will seethed. "You couldn’t think of _anything—_ " Then she stopped, head cocked.

"What?" I could feel my heart skip a beat already. “What’s—"

She lunged forward, slapping her hand over my mouth, and my nose was filled with the lingering scent of nail polish. "Hush." Then in my head— _Somebody else is here. Another elemental. Follow me._


	10. The Back and Forth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They flap their hideous wings in grim delight,  
> And stuff our gory hearts into their maws. 
> 
> -Birds of Prey, Claude McKay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: violence/blood

"Jo," said Will in a low, urgent voice, "check outside the door."

Jo nodded, face drawn and worried—

"Did she just nod?" Will asked me.

“What?”

“I can’t see her, remember?”

“Oh. Right. Yes, she nodded.”

Jo vanished through the wall. Gurjas had vanished the moment things had gotten tense, although I couldn’t blame him. Will hadn’t ever picked up he was there, and hearing about yourself was bizarre for anybody. I supposed if he didn’t _talk,_ Will couldn’t hear him. Trying to work out the logic of that made my head hurt.

_What’s going on?_ I thought as loudly as I could manage, and Will winced a little.

_You don’t need to yell. Just, uh—remember how I asked if you were in danger?_

_Yes. You made it sound like a normal question oh my god there’s somebody after me WHAT THE HELL._

_Your train of thought would be funnier if it wasn’t so badly timed,_ she sighed.

_Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you—_ it was panicky and out of tune, but it was what I had.

Johara stuck her head back through the wall. "I don’t recognize them," she said nervously. "That’s bad, right?"

"What do they _look_ like?"

"Uh, red hair, really tall—?"

"Shit." Will tugged me to my feet. _Jamal, where does that window go?_

_Outside? The back yard? Neverland? I just moved here._

_I’ll take it._

_We’re on the second floor!_

She shoved the window open and stuck her head outside. _There’s dirt, and a bush. You’ll live._

"Who even _is_ this person?" I asked.

"Annoying," Will grumbled—then the window snapped shut, almost biting off her fingers. She yanked her hands back, shooting a snarl over her shoulder.

A click of heels against hardwood announced the stranger’s ascent up the stairs, and soon, they appeared—a tall, leather-clad woman with flame-red hair and a self-satisfied grin on her face. Unlike my hair, hers had definitely come out of a bottle, and from the looks of how close some of her clothing clung to her body, that might have come out of a bottle too. She looked like an off-duty dominatrix, leather straps criss-crossing her chest under her shiny jacket. It was pretty cute, actually, in a Mad Max sort of way—I just couldn’t get over the smirk.

"Lila," Will groaned. "What do you _want?_ "

"Willow," she preened back. "I’m surprised to find you here. Have you expanded your clientele? Or are times just that hard?"

"I will _hurt you_ ," Will hissed back. I didn’t really understand the comment, but I thought perhaps I should be offended. With how Will’s eyes were flashing, though, I decided just to step back and let the two of _them_ fight. Nothing to do with me.

"I’m here for the new Salt girl. I need a favour.”

Wait. What now? "I’m sorry, what?" I managed to sputter out.

“And you’re what, asking nicely as you break into her house? She’s got better things to do, Lila.”

Lila’s red lips formed a perfect pout. "Shouldn’t we ask _her?_ What’s your name, darling?"

_Don’t look into her eyes,_ came the warning in my head. I wasn’t sure how much to listen to Will, but I could at least be smart. I focused on Lila’s lips instead. "Jamal. My name’s Jamal. Don’t call me darling."

"Jamal. What a nice name. I need your help."

"Your _help?_ " Despite myself, I glanced up at her eyes—then away again. I didn’t trust how much they shone. I’d seen a lot of weird shit in the last few days, and I decided to trust Will on this one.

She smiled sweetly, flipping her hair over her shoulder. "I need somebody around who can help me calm people down. Especially in bad situations. I’ve got a lot of friends going through rough times, and they want a kind of comfort I can’t give them."

I glanced over at Will. Another thing I hadn’t been told. "And what does that have to do with Salt?"

"…Oh sweetie, you’re _new._ Aren’t you?"

"Stop calling me sweetie," I mumbled. "And yes." I wasn’t sure what kind of comfort she meant but I didn’t like the way she said it, no matter what. It _sounded_ altruistic enough. Everything about it dripped with slime.

Will sighed. "Salts can talk to the dead. But your secondary ability is that when elementals spin out, you can… get them back under control."

I snorted. "That doesn’t sound like me. I start fights, not end them."

"It doesn’t have to, dear. So why don’t you come with me and help me—"

"You’re full of shit," Will interrupted, voice harsh.

" _Willow._ "

Will turned her back, yanking at the window and trying to get it open again—then she flew backwards across the room, some invisible force yanking her away. I sprang for her, but the same force hit me in the chest, and I fell into the desk, the sharp edge hitting me in the middle of the back. I struggled to stop the dizziness, my entire body suddenly aching. Lila’s hands were outstretched in front of her, and her pout turned into a cruel smile.

"Stop getting in the way," she taunted at Will. "It seems like _every_ time I turn around, you’re messing with _my_ territory. She’s on my turf, which means she’s—"

"Nobody belongs to you, you uppity bitch," Will grumbled. "And your ‘turf’ ends at Wellington."

"What’s a city block between friends?"

I stumbled to my feet, digging in my pocket for my knife. I flicked it open, but it jerked out of my hand, coming alive and then twirling slowly in the air.

"A knife? That’s rather bad-mannered." The point of my knife turned to face me. "Maybe I should teach you a lesson—"

" _Stop,_ " came Will’s voice. Lila froze, but the knife kept turning, the dim light sending sparkles off of the dull blade. I looked over at Will—her head was bent, hair falling over her face, but I could see the focused look in her blue eyes, cold and sharp as ice. " _Drop the knife._ "

The knife clattered to the ground, leaving a small nick in the wooden floor.

" _Turn and leave."_

Nothing happened. Will chewed on her lip and opened her mouth—then the knife lifted from the ground and drove straight for her face.

_"STOP!"_

The knife didn’t stop—but it changed course, just nicking the edge of Will’s arm and pulling a cry of pain from her lips. It snapped me out of my shocked daze—I ran for Lila while she was distracted, then ducked and kicked at her high-heeled feet. She fell forward with a snarl, one of the heels snapping, and I winced at the dull thud as her face met the landing.

"Don’t feel bad," Will grumbled. "She’s horrible."

I backed away from her as she slowly got to her feet. "I think you should leave my house now," I said with a confidence I really didn’t feel.

"Fine," she spat. "I know when I’m not wanted." She got to her feet, dusting off her black pants and corset, then stalked down the stairs, wavering as she wiped some of the blood off her face.

The moment she was gone, Will sat down on the floor with a heavy ‘thunk’.

"Are you okay?" Johara asked.

"I’ve had worse," she grumbled. The nick in her arm wasn’t deep, but there was blood welling up slowly between her fingers. I grabbed a dishtowel that was hanging over the railing and knelt down next to her, wrapping it around her arm.

"Is that okay?"

She twisted it tighter. "That’ll do. I should probably check in with Avery."

"Alright. Thanks for, well. Today."

"Oh, no no no. You’re coming with me."

I was about to disagree, then—"Yes. Yes, I am. Because what the _hell_ are you not telling me?"

"She’s trying to respect me," said Gurjas from behind me, and I started with a yelp.

"Oh, what, you leave when things get tough and show up again once the weird woman’s gone?"

"I was here the whole time. Willow wants to respect that I kept my abilities secret. But I was a Salt like you." His eyes shone slightly at that, and for a second, he looked _younger._ I didn’t know how or why, but ghosts as a whole were still a mystery to me.

"And you didn’t tell me fuck all. You’re really not winning me over." I couldn’t help the bitterness. _Nobody_ was telling me anything.

Will stared up in Gurjas’s general area. " _You_ pulled her into this?"

"Not on purpose. I just wanted peace."

Will sighed. "I guess there was nobody else."

"Nobody else? Well there must be—" I paused. It was starting to click together in my head, and I didn’t like it. "…Will. Why was Lila coming to _me?_ Where are all the other Salts? There’s—there’s lots of them. Right?"

There was silence from both of them, and I glanced up at Johara, who stared back at me, coming to the same horrible conclusion I was.

"They’re dead," Will murmured. "There’s you, and one other. There’s only two Salts left in the city."


	11. Interlude: NACH VORN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Du liebes Kind,   
> komm, geh mit mir!   
> Gar schöne Spiele   
> spiel ich mit dir;   
> Manch bunte Blumen   
> sind an dem Strand,   
> Meine Mutter hat   
> manch gülden Gewand."
> 
> "Oh, come thou dear infant!   
> oh come thou with me!   
> Full many a game I will   
> play there with thee;   
> On my strand lovely flowers   
> their blossoms unfold,   
> My mother shall grace thee   
> with garments of gold."
> 
> -The Erl-King, Goethe

Once upon a time, there were two little girls, who lived in a house in the middle of the woods with their father. One day, he went into town as usual, and came back with a wife. The wife did not like the daughters; the daughters did not particularly like _her_ either. Still, they made an uneasy peace with her.

Until, one day, the cold came. It was a quick cold, but a biting one—and it killed every fresh crop, every growing field, every unprotected living thing it touched. There was no harvest—and no food.

Things got worse and worse. The larders emptied out, and the girls went to bed hungry every night. When Younger Sister cried from the pain in her stomach, Older Sister sang quiet songs to her, and wove stories of their _true_ mother. Neither of them remembered her; but where there was no memory or truth to be had, fairytale was enough.

One morning, their father stirred them from their beds, and told them to follow him into the woods. They were going to gather firewood, he said—but before they left, the birds chirped to Younger Sister, "Take heed! Take heed! Fill your pockets with stones! Leave a trail!"

Younger Sister did so, and as their father led them deeper and deeper among the towering trees, she trailed the stones behind them, white and pearly against the dark loam of the forest floor. Then, she looked up—and their father was gone. They were lost. But Younger Sister found the trail of stones and guided them back to their cottage. Their father’s face was filled with mixed relief and shame, but they could see the fury in their stepmother’s face. The next morning, they were awoken even earlier, and herded out to the forest too fast to keep with them anything more than a crust of bread. Younger Sister crumbled it behind her to leave a trail; however, when once again, their father vanished and they were left alone in the forest, she turned behind her to see nothing but the birds eating the crumbs she’d left.

"Why do you betray me like this?" she cried. But it was too late. They were lost.

Older Sister closed her eyes. She turned in a circle, trying to feel the winds, the earth under her feet. Then she opened her eyes and took Younger Sister’s hand.

"What are we going to do?" Younger Sister asked.

Older Sister looked down at Younger Sister. They were all each other had left in the world. Even if they _could_ make it back to their home, she realized, it wasn’t home any more. They were no longer welcome.

"Survive," she said. She squeezed Younger Sister’s hands and strode into the dark.

There was nowhere else to go but forward.


	12. A Little Fucked Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A vivir ignorado  
> de tus luces, me ausento  
> donde ni aun mi mal sirva  
> a tu desdén de obsequio. 
> 
> To live unobserved  
> by your eyes, I now go  
> where never pain of mine  
> need flatter your disdain. 
> 
> -I Approach and I Withdraw, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for smoking, PTSD, mild violence, trauma stuff

I’d tried to quit smoking something like five times, and I was on try number six. I only had three cigarettes left—two now, I guessed—but desperate times called for desperate measures, and after dealing with the last few days with what I thought was an _exceptional_ amount of grace—I needed a goddamn smoke.

Now if my hands would stop _shaking._ It was cold out here, on the steps of my house. That was my excuse. My thumb kept slipping off the wheel of my lighter.

"Here," murmured Will. She took the lighter from my hands, flicking it on and then holding the flame to the end of my cigarette. It was starting to get dark outside. Where had the day gone? I couldn’t even remember half of it. The shapeshifter. Calling Will. Lila.

"We should talk about that Mercury that keeps rolling around your head," Will said quietly, and I jerked away. She flipped the lighter closed. "Sorry. It's—pretty loud."

I tried to relax. She was trying. God knows I hadn't been able to stop thinking about it. "...Is..." I swallowed. Paranoia versus good sense. Paranoia _was_ good sense. "Why was Avery outside my house that night? When I went to LeBreton Flats?" I tried to keep something repeating in my mind, to maintain _some_ element of privacy. _Peter Piper picked a peck of pepper how the fuck does this go again? Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb—_ Realistically, I should just talk to Will about it. But I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that all these freaks (don’t call them freaks you’re one too) showing up at once couldn’t be a coincidence.

The look in Will’s eyes wasn’t helping the paranoia, either. She kept looking at the ground, counting grains in the asphalt. "They keep track of people they think might be, y’know. Gifted."

"Gifted. That's a new word for it."

"Eh, there's lots of words for it." She chuckled lightly. There was a sadness to it. _Cursed, more like it,_ my brain supplied. Haunted. "Avery is—look, forget what Lila said. Lila’s a self-centered prick. Avery looks out for people." Will lit her own cigarette, although from the face she made while taking her first puff on it, she wasn’t a big smoker.

"Don’t feel obliged on my account. It’s bad for you."

"So’s being trans," she replied with a wry cynicism, “but I manage okay. I’m keeping you company. Anyway. You were asking about Avery."

I paused. "Are they actually a cab driver?"

"Pfft. Yes."

"…For real."

"For real! Licensed and everything."

I stared at Will. She didn’t _look_ like she was fucking with me…this time. "They can control minds and they drive a taxi."

"We don’t _control minds._ We just…suggest things. Strongly."

I snorted. "That’s one way of putting it." The cigarette was helping. I didn't feel so much like I wanted to cry. "So they just like doing it? Being a cab driver?"

"I mean, yeah. They like helping people. And it’s not like we can just go get any job we want. It doesn’t work like that."

"Like hell it doesn’t."

"Not if we wanna be _good_ people," she retorted. "Besides, I can only control so many people at once. Tricking one person into thinking I can do, I don’t know, taxes or something is one thing. Tricking a whole corporation is quite another."

I supposed she had a point. Mind control had scary implications. Then I frowned, tucking one of my hands in my armpit to ward off the cold and cocking my head at her with a nervous look. "So even before you could hear Jo—you knew what I was?"

"Avery more than me. It's something you develop with time. Apparently."

"Ah. You’re almost as new to this at me."

"Not _exactly._ Just, kinda new to being decent about it."

That explained a lot, including the tender way she said Avery’s name. I took my cigarette from my mouth, lowering it down by my thigh so I could think. "...How'd you meet Avery? You two seem pretty close. And you already said you're not dating."

Will brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, flicking my lighter on and off and sending orange patterns flickering over her face. "I can probably tell you another time. Like I said. They like helping people."

I couldn’t help but be a little skeptical. "It’s not _that_ selfless. Is it?"

"Maybe not."

"I can—what, stabilize people? What does that mean? I’m not a bloody therapist, and I’m a _lousy_ medium."

She laughed, then shivered a little in the cold. "God, I should have worn pants."

"Probably."

"Don’t sass me. Uh, stabilization is—basically, powers are a pain in the ass. Lila’s an Earth elemental. She can—well, you saw. She can move things with her mind."

"Including people?"

"Yeah. Which is my least favourite bit."

"And her problem is—?"  
  


She rolled her eyes at that. "Christ. Power trips and an utter inability to ask for help instead of treating people like tools. Weirdly enough, we get along fine when she hasn’t decided she’s Dominatrix Queen of the Paeons again."

I gaped at Will, who raised an eyebrow. "… she _stabbed_ you."

"Not _hard._ "

"That was still a stabbing!"

Will shrugged. "I’ve done worse." Then at my look, she grinned sheepishly. "I _said_ I was new to being a good person."

I decided I wasn’t regretting the smoke. Not after getting thrown around like a ragdoll by somebody with psychic powers. I took another deep puff of my cigarette, then coughed as I got a lungful of ash—okay, maybe that part tasted a bit of regret. "You’re still dodging around what stabilization is."

"Our powers aren’t as stable as they look. They react to our emotions, how we’re feeling, how we’re doing. And sometimes they get a little out of control." Her breath came out of her mouth as smoke in the cold air. "So, yeah. Stabilization is how we can reel things back."

My heart dropped into my stomach. I didn’t want to think about what ‘out of control’ meant. _Out of control mind-control powers… "_ Earth. You said Earth. There’s Fire?"

"Yeah."

"Out of control fire powers."

Will swallowed. "Yeah."

"And—and how often does—" I tried to stop squeaking. Tried to get the image of fire out of my head. _Fire, Earth, Air, Water, Sulfur, Salt, Mercury._ "This is a normal thing."

"Normal-ish? Usually there’s more Salts around to help us out. And for the core elementals they all stabilize each other so it’s not as bad."

"This is—This is a lot." I couldn’t breathe. "So Sulfur a-and Mercury, the shapeshifter ones—they _need_ Salt elementals. To—to stop being, what, crazy?”

Will flinched a bit at that. "It’s not that simple."

"How often does it happen? _How often?_ "

"It’s kind of a prerequisite to be a little fucked up. So, uh, pretty often."

I dropped the cigarette and ground it out under my heel, storming back towards the house.

“Jamal—"

"I’m _not a therapist!"_ I shot back.

"It’s not like that—"

"What does prerequisite even _mean?_ "

"It’s how we get the stupid abilities in the first place!"

I paused, hands slowly closing into fists in the air. Then I turned on my heel, glaring back at Will. " _What._ "

"You hadn’t figured that out?"

"I have met _five_ people with weird superhuman abilities so far, and had extended conversations with two of them," I growled through gritted teeth. "Now what’s this about how we have to be ‘a little fucked up’?"

Will took a step backwards. "Er, you’re not going to start with the punching again, are you?”

"That _depends._ Do I _have_ to—?"

"Trauma," she sighed, her eyes fixed on mine with a flicker of—I wasn’t sure if it was uncertainty, fear, or just the trepidation of telling me something she knew I didn’t want to hear, reflecting my own raging emotions back at me. "We get our powers because of trauma."

I could feel something splintering in my chest. Who knows why. Maybe it was just because I didn’t want to think about it—the horrible little question that had been chasing me around my whole life. _Why._ Why can you see ghosts? Why do the dead cluster to you? Why are you still talking to your sister years after burying her?

I didn’t want to know.

"Get out."

"I’m already outside—"

" _I don’t care._ "

I stalked back inside, and slammed the door behind me, the impact shaking the doorframe. I didn’t _have_ trauma. I just had a stupid shitty life, but it wasn’t—it wasn’t trauma if you didn’t _know_ anything else. It didn’t count. It didn’t count.

"Jamal?"

Jo was in front of me, grey eyes wide. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t want to _figure it out._ I didn’t want to feel bad about slamming the door on Will or about—any of this.

I sat down on the stairs with a dull thud, rubbing my eyes and trying not to cry. "Yeah?"

"It’s pretty cold outside. Are you sure you want to leave her out there?"

"Don’t lecture me," I grumbled. "She can go home."

Jo raised an eyebrow at me. I pretended not to see it and leant my head onto my knees. Time passed. I wasn’t sure how much.

"Jamal," she said quietly.

"I know," I murmured back. I really was going to cry. Jo was my conscience. If she’d just died and I’d never been able to talk to her again—

I opened the door. Will was sitting on the porch steps, shivering and toying with the loose end of the dishrag still tied around her arm. "You’re not gonna leave, huh?" I said, unable to hide the smile. I probably would have preferred it if she _had_ gone home, but…

"I would, but I would prefer it if nobody killed you while I wasn’t looking."

I could appreciate that. "…I don’t have a couch. I don’t even have a bed."

"That’s fine. I’m pretty much nocturnal anyway.”

I leaned against the doorframe with a sigh. "Do you like horror movies?"

"Hell yeah." She got to her feet. I couldn’t tell if the red on her cheeks was from the cold or if she’d been crying. "Wait, you can’t afford a bed, but you have Netflix?"

"Who needs Netflix? I have the Internet."

"I like how you think."

I caught Jo’s eye as Will came back in, and she gave me a thumbs up. I flapped at her with a scowl. I didn’t need her teasing me. I had a friend. It was a start.


	13. Avoiding the Question

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I forget you, have forgotten you.   
> I am busy only at my burning,   
> I am busy only at my life.   
> But my feet are on your grave, planted.
> 
> -All Souls, D.H. Lawrence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: paranoia

My house was quiet in the mornings. I guess part of that was me getting used to living on my own—even though I had a roommate moving in, when was it, tomorrow?—it wasn’t a house filled with somebody else’s family. I was _supposed_ to be here. And as a result, instead of voices waking me up at odd times or somebody else’s phone ringing, I opened my eyes to a blissful quiet _._

It took me a moment to remember that I wasn’t actually alone. Will had propped herself up against the far wall, her legs stuck out in front of her and dishrag around her arm swapped out for a bandaid. She’d let her ponytail down last night, but there were still bobby pins strewn throughout her kinked, slightly frizzy hair.

I didn’t remember the last time I’d actually spent time with another human being that wasn’t dead or somebody on sufferance. I’d actually enjoyed myself. Which meant—

Which meant _danger._ Which meant I had to not let my guard down. It felt strange articulating it that clearly, but it didn’t make it any less true.

Speaking of guard—I hadn’t realized I could feel his presence, but I could tell that Gurjas was gone. I wasn’t sure where he’d gone—home, possibly, or his workplace, any or all of the places he’d hung around when he was alive. Anywhere would have been better than here, with a girl he didn’t know who was trying and failing to catch his murderer.

Still, I’d gotten used to him, even with his stony silences and his refusal to cave to anything or admit to things. Even being a Salt. There was a stubbornness to it I had to appreciate, even as much as it infuriated me that everybody was keeping secrets from me.

I got to my feet as quietly as I could and stared down at Will. I didn’t know whether or not to acknowledge the anxious lump in my throat. ‘Didn’t know’ seemed to be the theme lately. I didn’t know if I should believe her about being in danger. Lila hadn’t seemed _that_ dangerous until my knife had ended up in Will’s arm. I couldn’t see how keeping me in the dark kept me any safer, though, and there was so much I didn’t yet understand, so much that I was trying not to second-guess into oblivion-

Me being in danger though?

Somehow, I couldn’t see Will lying about that.

Maybe I was just going soft.

I shrugged on my jean jacket. It was light outside already. I’d slept in later than usual—but that was a good thing. Whatever nightmares I’d had were groggy and clouded, unclear beyond the faint feeling of unease that I just accepted as a constant companion. Then I knelt carefully by Will and picked up the phone by her side, keeping the image of a brick wall in my head. She was asleep, but I couldn’t be too careful.

"What are you doing?"

I knew what Johara was asking, but I avoided it anyway. "I’m going out to hand out some more resumes."

"You did most of them online."

"Yeah, and now I’m doing some more in person."

"You need to steal Will’s phone for that?"

I sighed, walking into the kitchen and closing the door behind me so Will wouldn’t wake up and overhear. Johara just phased through the door, glaring at me with bright eyes. "Don’t ignore me," she snarled.

I put the phone down on the kitchen table, slumping down onto one of the battered wooden chairs, which creaked under my weight. Then I glanced up at Johara, whose eyes were sparking with disappointed rage. "She’s not telling me everything. I’m not going to follow a stranger around blindly when—"

"When you could totally betray her trust instead?"

"Do you have any better ideas?"

Jo sighed, tight curls falling over her face. She was more solid than usual today; sometimes getting angry did that to her, and right now I almost felt like I could reach forward and touch her. Her feet touched the floor. Her hair ended in points instead of slight fudges of mist. But—

But she was still dead.

"Look, you don’t have to _trust_ her. But hear her out. You keep not letting her talk."

"I’m letting her talk."

"No, you’re not. You keep interrupting her or freaking out over little details. And you _still_ haven’t told me who you were talking to the other day that freaked you out so badly, so honestly, you don’t have a _whole_ lot of room to whine about people not telling you things!"

I could have answered her, or yelled at her, or even acknowledged that she wasn’t wrong. Instead, I picked up the pile of resumes and Will’s phone and walked away.

"Jamal."

I didn’t respond.

"Jamal, _don’t ignore me!_ "

I didn’t feel good about it. But I kept walking away anyway. I knew what would happen if I turned back and apologized and gave Will her phone back—I’d be up all night, wracked with paranoia I couldn’t understand, couldn’t get a hold on. This wasn’t even about Gurjas anymore. It’d become about _me,_ and that meant I had to chase down the answers and wring their necks and make the little restless voice inside of me stop.

Basically, Jo could hate me now, or she could hate me later. Pick a door.

_It’s kind of a prerequisite to be a little fucked up._

Not that door. That door was staying shut.

I left, head kept firmly down—

—which meant I rammed it firmly into the chest of the guy who was standing at the door, fist up as if he was trying to knock. "Ow!" I tottered backwards. "The _fuck?_ "

"…Hi."

I blinked away the little birdies from my eyes. " _Nathan?_ I said Thursday!"

"It’s Thursday!"

"It’s _Tuesday._ "

"Is it?"

"All day, dude. Go ho—" I glanced down at the paisley suitcase he was dragging behind him. "…Really."

"I thought it was Thursday!"

Hell no. I had what was about to be a _very_ pissed off psychic upstairs, and I didn’t know how Will was going to react to her phone getting stolen, but I doubted it was going to be good.

"Stick that in here." I grabbed the suitcase, shoved it against the stairs, then turned Nathan forcibly around and steered him off the porch. Then I turned around and locked the door behind me.

"Er…" Nathan peered over my shoulder, as if staring at my lock would tell him something. "Where are we going?"

I glanced down at the stack of resumes in my hand, then turned to him with an exaggerated and _very_ fake grin. "The second half of your roommate interview! While I hand these out."

"Resumes? I thought you were a private investigator."

"Part time. I—Hey, I’ll ask the questions here."

"See? You’re great at it."

"Shut _up._ "

I was going to pay for this later. Either from Will, or from my sister—but either way, I’d bought myself time to get into Will’s phone and get some more answers.

Speaking of which… I glanced down at the lockscreen as I walked down the street. Lockscreens told you a lot about somebody – mine was a starry night sky, one of the defaults when I’d gotten it that had spoken to me at the time. Will’s on the other hand was some anime character, a girl with a shock of golden hair and a flaming red dress. It took me a moment to place it, then I snorted. Panty and Stocking. Of course.

I called to mind what I’d seen from Will last night. I could almost remember it. Across, then down.

I tried once. No luck. Once more. Still locked.

Across two, then diagonal—

There was a beep, and Will’s phone let me in. It opened onto a texting app, and there wasn’t anything on the screen other than the name of the contact on the top—

"Ophis?" I murmured.

"What?"

"Uh, never mind."

Then something appeared on the screen. A message.

**OPHIS: You’re late.**

I stared at it, uncomprehending—then yanked my notebook out of my pocket, jotting down a new word on a fresh page.

OPHIS.

Will was reporting back to somebody.

I was right.


	14. Chasing the Threads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Straining closed eyes of vanished memory,   
> Like one who searches for a bygone self   
> And only meets the corpse of his desire. 
> 
> -Savitri, Canto I, Sri Aurobindo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: past implied mentalism/mental ableism, paranoia, unreality, CSA reference, racism

I wasn’t upset. Of course. Just—resigned, was the word, I guess. I stuffed the phone back into my pocket, cleared my throat, and gave Nathan the closest thing to a warm smile I had.

Nathan returned it, a lot more genuinely than I’d expected, although I could still see the nervousness flashing around his acne-scarred face. "Uh, so this second part to the roommate interview—"

"Yeah?"

"Is there actually any chance of you not letting me move in? Cause I kind of already told my parents I wasn’t coming back."

I flapped my hand at him. "You’re fine." I shoved most of my resumes at him, plucking one off the top. "Hold these."

"Uh, sure. Where are we going?"

"Anywhere that looks likely to hire a brown kid with a nice smile and no high school diploma."

Nathan gave me what he probably thought was an encouraging smile. "You know, I was really hoping ‘private investigator’ meant ‘steady income.’"

"Then you’ve proved decades of dumb blonde jokes correct." I raised an eyebrow as he looked a little like he was going to faint. "Don’t worry, I have money."

"D-do I want to ask?"

"I did paperwork for a dying lady for two years."

"What happened?"

"She died, genius."

He nodded consideringly. "That would explain why your resume says—uh, what is that? Geriatric care?"

"…I’m stretching the truth."

Nathan sighed, but left it at that. First stop, McDonald’s. He behaved, surprisingly enough, while I started my usual pitch to the bored, greasy-haired cashier—

—and got shut down a minute in with "Apply online."

Well. Fine.

"You know most of them are going to tell you that," Nathan said quietly on the way out.

"Shut up. I already did. You think anybody with the name _Jamal_ is going to get past any of the upper management?"

"I mean, you never _know,_ " he started, then drifted off into awkward silence.

"Yeah. That’s what I thought, _Nathan._ " I glared at the offending resume, then sighed. What was the point of spending so much energy trying to solve weird twisty paranormal mysteries if freakin’ McDonald’s wouldn’t even _look_ at my resume because I didn’t have a white enough name? Yeah, yeah, I know. Percentages. Just, I’d applied at twenty other places as well.

Well, there were at least another twenty in walking distance.

"Tie up your shoes. We’ve got a while to go."

——

By the time I managed to run out of resumes—many of which I pawned off on overtired cashiers who lacked the strength of personality or resistance to charisma to actually say no—we were so far down Wellington that my feet hurt just thinking about the walk back. (In fact, so far down that it had turned into Richmond Road. Who the hell designed this city?) So when Nathan sat down at the Whispers Pub patio with a flop and offered to buy a plate of nachos, I couldn’t quite bring myself to say no.

As it turned out, I didn’t mind him. I mean, socializing was still painful. I’d found myself pretending to reread my resume or my notepad a couple of times on the way down, dreading having to make small talk. But he was happy to fill the gap with looseleaf chatter, not too densely, just a few comments here and there about his first job, friends of friends he’d known and their attempts to get hired or fired at fast food chains and coffeeshops and factories—it had the nice bonus that I knew more about him than he knew about me. I loved Jo, but she was a little too prone to uncomfortable truths about me, and I’d had a couple too many of those lately. Nathan was so comfortably detached from everything paranormal.

"So how do you _do_ private investigation-y stuff anyway?"

I sipped on my iced tea. "Mostly by knowing how to use a computer. You’d be surprised what being a millennial will get you."

"Are we even millennials anymore?" he mused. "I think we’re technically the next one."

"Depends. When were you born?"

"Ninety-seven."

"Then you’re good. As long as it’s before the new millennium."

"I thought the cut-off was ninety-four." Then Nathan paused. "Wait, how old are _you?_ "

I dodged the question. The follow-up question was always ‘why aren’t you in school’ and I hated that question. "I use deep-web stuff sometimes, but a lot of it is just plugins and knowing what I’m doing. And charisma."

"Huh. Okay." Beat. "I feel like asking too many questions is a _bad_ idea."

"Probably. What about you? Dreams, aspirations, nightmares?"

"Being able to eat gluten," he said morosely, staring at the menu. "Corn chips, cheese and vegetables are _usually_ safe."

"Okay, so no covering the kitchen in flour."

He cast me a bitter look, or rather, what was probably intended to be one. On his round-cheeked face it looked a bit more like a pouting chipmunk.

"Joking."

" _Good."_

I stirred the ice in my drink around with a straw, smiling a little despite myself. Who was I turning _into?_ A night hanging out with a beautiful, mysterious woman and now, getting drinks with my roommate. It was almost like I could be normal. Almost like I wasn’t some sort of weird bridge between the living and the dead.

That brought me to my next problem. I had to tell Nathan _something._

"So…um…"

Nathan slurped on his Coke. "Yeah?"

Wording. Wording was important. "About roommate stuff."

"Do you sleepwalk?"

"What? No." I paused. "At least, I don’t think so." Johara would have told me if I did, but after the last few days I liked to leave room for the unexpected.

"Oh, good. My dad sleepwalks. It’s really awkward, especially ‘cause he sleeps naked—"

"I _don’t_ sleepwalk," I interrupted. "I just, uh. Talk to myself a lot."

He nodded, mouth still wrapped around his straw. Then he made a considering expression. "…Like, thinking out loud? Or, uh, voices in the walls kind of thing?"

"Thinking out loud." Not entirely true, but I’d gotten threatened with the mental ward before. Just because he seemed nice so far didn’t mean I was willing to push it.

"Yeah, that’s fine. Just keep it down. As long as you do the dishes, I’m fine." Nathan finished his drink, then winced. "I’ll be right back. Washroom."

"Sure."

Once he was away from the table, I pulled out Will’s phone. The text had erased itself, and I made a note to myself to research whatever app they were using, but the contact was still there. I debated texting something back, but without any previous messages, I couldn’t pretend to be Will with any degree of accuracy.

Something else occurred to me, though. I flipped to a new page of my pad and chewed on the tip of my pen. The thing was, I couldn’t remember if it’d been me or Jo, but we’d mentioned Mrs. Chaudhury by name the first time we’d met Will. It had taken seeing his picture for Will to fess up to knowing him. Maybe she’d been lying, and especially after the message from Ophis I had to consider that possibility. But—

But then there was the girl.

I had to go back a few pages to find it. The ghost on LeBreton flats had seen the girl with Gurjas—the girl that nobody else seemed to know about. I didn’t know who I was looking for, or if I was looking for another body, another ghost or a missing kid. I just knew that there’d been another person there when he died, and nobody else seemed to have any idea. Shapeshifters existed. That complicated things. She could be anybody – but if she’d seen Gurjas’s murder, and she was alive and around, why hadn’t she said anything? Had _she_ killed him?

And then there was every possibility that she and Kiera were the same person. But I doubted that, for some reason. ‘Not white’, the ghost had said. That didn’t narrow things down much, and it wasn’t like I knew much about Kiera yet. But the self-assured, preening white woman I’d met on Lebreton Flats didn’t strike me as the type to be a young Black or Asian or Latina kid running scared from the scene of a crime. God, I wished the ghost had been more specific. Dead people didn’t have the greatest memory for details.

Okay, well, I had a possible extra factor in the case, but no information otherwise. I shifted back to what had been bugging me. Gurjas had been hiding something. Will and Avery recognized Gurjas – not the name Chaudhury. He’d been using a fake name, at least for his last name. Whatever else he’d been mixed up in, he’d been keeping his wife and kids out of it.

I groaned and let my head slump down onto the table. I was still missing too many pieces. As much as I was skeptical of _any_ grown man’s intentions, Gurjas didn’t strike me as the abductor creep type.

"Aw, don’t stress yourself out."

A chill ran down my spine. I lifted my head.

Nathan was sitting in his chair again, leaning on his arms on the table with a casual grin on his face. He was the most relaxed I’d ever seen him—I’d never seen him _not_ picking at his hair or his arm, or nervously scratching at the backs of his hands.

Which meant—

"I figured you’d show up again sooner or later," I mumbled.

Nathan’s face split into a wide smile, and green eyes sparkled from his broad face, under his rumpled blond hair.


	15. Thief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Like witches with charms didst thou work;   
> And in witch's guise | among men didst thou go;   
> Unmanly thy soul must seem." 
> 
> -Lokasenna, Poetic Edda, lines 25-27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Transphobia, implied stalking, gaslighting, aggressive behaviour

"That was disappointingly quick," they purred, folding their hands under their chin. "What’s the point of being a shapeshifter if you keep catching on?"

"Try investing in acting lessons." The cold paranoia was creeping up my spine again. At least this time I knew. And they _knew_ I knew. No more mind games.

Of course, maybe I was speaking too soon.

"We’ve met before. Haven’t we?" I asked quietly, trying to dislodge the feeling from my back. It was _more_ than just paranoia. It was that feeling of having forgotten something.

A spark of excitement appeared in the false Nathan’s green eyes. "You remember?"

"Yeah." I paused. "You were out on LeBreton. Right? You’re Kiera, or at least that’s what Avery called you."

The spark vanished, and their eyes went flat. For whatever reason, that wasn’t the answer they wanted. "Yes, that’s me."

"That’s how you disappeared on me." I chewed on my pen. "So can you turn into anything?"

"I’m not here to be _interviewed._ Although it’s entertaining how utterly clueless you are about yourself."

"I wasn’t asking about myself."

"It’s all part of the same thing."

"How?"

"I already said I wasn’t—"

"Nobody will give me a damn straight answer," I snapped. "And this is twice now you’ve cornered me with somebody else’s face."

Kiera frowned, then chuckled. "Fine. What _have_ you gotten?"

"Four core elements, three celestial elements. Seven total."

"And you know what I am." 

"A Mercury." I couldn’t help a jibe. "I Googled it. Apparently, mercury’s poisonous."

She stuck her tongue out at me—or Nathan’s tongue, I supposed. "In large doses. Anyway, you and I are both celestial elementals."

"Big words."

"It means we’re special." That grin came back. I didn’t trust it. I didn’t trust _her._

I debated asking her for more. But—

"Where’s Nathan?"

Her smile dropped. "Oh, boo. We’re talking big questions of identity, and you’re worried about some dumb boy?"

"Where is he?" 

"I gave him a bonk on the head. He’s in the bathroom. He’ll be fine."

"A bonk on the head," I repeated. "You know anything that knocks somebody out is a minor concussion, right?"

"Oh, whatever. He’s not even an elemental."

I forced myself not to react. This was one of the few moments where even I knew that punching wouldn’t solve anything. It would be really damn satisfying, though.

"Are there a lot of you shapeshifters around?" I asked as casually as I could manage. I doubted it, somehow—or at least that I’d somehow attracted _two_ shapeshifters.

"There’s a few, but we’re a rare breed compared to the rest of you."

"Which means you’re the one paying me."

"Yes. Why?"

"No reason. Just making sure I’m not mixing up my tricksters."

Kiera snickered. "I probably _should_ spend more time with you with my real face. It is the one you saw first, though."

"Tall, black hair?"

"That’s the one. Do you like it?"

"Jury’s out." I didn’t like the way she was looking at me. Actually, I didn’t like anything about her. I didn’t like the way she was leaning across the table, glittering eyes fixed on mine. I didn’t like what she had done to Nathan, even if I could trust that the poor kid was alive. I didn’t like the casual way she stole identities.

More than anything else, I didn’t like the feeling that I was missing something. Something _important._ Something that I was supposed to know.

"On the topic of the case," she said lightly, "any luck?"

"On figuring out who killed him? Nah. I’m chasing some leads, but nothing so far."

"Maybe I can help—" She reached for the pad of paper, and I slid it off the table and into my pocket.

"I don’t think so."

"I’m your employer."

"I have my own methods. And I work alone."

"God, you’re a stick in the mud these days."

_These days._

I pressed my lips together and tried not to say anything. The nachos Nathan and I had ordered showed up, and Kiera rubbed her hands together, pulling one of them up. "What _are_ these?"

"…Nachos?"

"Hum. They _look_ good."

I pulled out Will’s phone, keeping it under the table so Kiera couldn’t guess it wasn’t mine. Thank god Will had a data plan. A quick Google search gave me the address of the place we were at—1009 Wellington Street West—and then I flipped over to the empty messenger app. Whoever Ophis was, if they had to do with Will, they wanted me for themselves. But that also meant they also wouldn’t want me captured or killed by a shapeshifter. Hopefully. I started typing.

 **WILLOW** : 249 richmond rd

 **WILLOW** : trouble

A moment later, the reply came.

 **OPHIS** : Thief.

Fuck. And no word on whether or not I was even getting a bailout.

I glanced around the restaurant. Fairly quiet, even for a Tuesday. I could just let Kiera say her piece and hope she would leave eventually. I could hope that Nathan was just unconscious or even that he was in on it and just chilling in a stall.

"I gotta pee."

"Uh huh. Don’t fall in." She flashed me a dazzling smile which told me that if I took too long, she was going to come check on me. I knew her kind of person. I’d had enough of them as "concerned" foster parents.

The bathroom hallway was around the corner, and I glanced at the door to the women’s, inching the door open to look inside. Multi-stall, which was frustrating, but workable. Then I took the extra few steps down the hallway and marched into the men’s washroom.

Nathan lay unconscious against the wall, another man crouched over him. "H-hey, you can’t-"

"Save it. He’s my brother," I lied easily. "Is he okay?"

"I’m not sure, I just came in here." The guy reached for Nathan’s wrist. "Uh, he’s got a MedAlert bracelet—should I call an ambulance?"

I hesitated, then grabbed for the bracelet. Never mind that I was supposed to be his sister—I had to know. _Celiac Disease._ I fumbled with my memory. A bump on the head _shouldn’t_ give him any trouble—assuming Kiera had told the truth. But if he had a concussion…

 _Somebody had better show up._ Whatever was going on, I didn’t want to stick an innocent bystander with an ambulance bill he might not be able to pay—and that I certainly couldn’t pay for him. I doubted Kiera was going to cover it.

"I got it from here." I flashed the guy a smile. "Don’t worry."

He didn’t look convinced, but strangers didn’t have to care about strangers. He’d done his good deed for the day.

I picked up Nathan with a huff, secretly glad he was thin as a rake. I could feel his ribs through his shirt. "God. Sorry," I murmured to him, too quiet to be heard by anybody else—and he was out like a light. "I’ll keep you more out of the way next time."

I made it to the door, pressed the auto-open and thanked the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act under my haggard breath—

—and came face to face with Kiera again, drumming her fingers against the wall next to the door and black hair draped into her eyes. Her proper face, this time.

"And here I thought you’d be using the _girl’s_ bathroom."

I hated her voice. I hated how she talked. And I hated, hated, _hated_ that she acted like we were old friends, that she could make little quips like that and they’d be funny. Like I hadn’t gotten called dyke and lez and butch and man-hands for _years._

The man behind me hid in the stall, and Kiera didn’t seem to recognize it, but I heard the click of a camera shutter. Idiot. He’d taken a picture of Kiera instead of calling the cops. The good news was, he would only get the backs of my and Nathan’s heads.

I edged out of the bathroom, but she still blocked the way back out to the restaurant. My jacket. My jacket—with my phone, my knife, my _pad—_ was still out in the restaurant.

I had Will’s phone. Fat lot of good that’d do me.

Kiera took another step towards me, looming over me in a way that I really, _really_ didn’t appreciate. "I gave you _money._ That means you report to _me."_ Any semblance of friendliness was gone, suddenly, as she let the heavy bathroom door slam closed. "Gurjas had somebody with him. A girl. Maybe your age, a bit younger. Where did she go?"

The girl.

Fuck.

"Look, I don’t know if this is gang business or drug business or something else way, way out of my league but you can have your money back—"

Kiera laughed. "I don’t think so. We _both_ know you can’t afford that."

Dammit, she was right. I didn’t want her to be right. I could tell myself I preferred being homeless to whatever this was, but it was—it was an _impossible_ situation.

I remembered, out of nowhere, what Avery had said about thinking loudly. Time to try it.

 _PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE HELP ME—_ I tried to remember the address as well. I got close enough, and an image of the pub’s front.

Kiera took another step forward, and I inched backwards, and added for good measure, _Will I am sorry about the phone thing! I do not want to die for it!_

I mean, it was worth a shot. Why had nobody given me _useful_ information, like the range on this mind reading thing?

_Hold your damn horses, I’m on my way._

Oh thank god.

A moment later, and infinitely sooner than I expected, Avery appeared in the hallway behind Kiera. _…You couldn’t say it was Kiera?_

 _I didn’t know she was a PROBLEM!_ Thank god thank god thank god Avery had been close—I wasn’t going to question why just yet—

Kiera sighed and glanced over her shoulder. "Really? Already? Jamal and I were just chatting."

_Jamal—run. She’s after you. Nathan will be fine._

I didn’t need to be told twice. I turned tail and fled—through the hallway, through the ‘employees-only’ door and as far, far away from Kiera as I could manage.


	16. Ophis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back, he spurred like a madman,   
> shrieking a curse to the sky,   
> With the white road smoking behind him   
> and his rapier brandished high.   
> Blood red were his spurs in the golden noon;   
> wine-red was his velvet coat 
> 
> -The Highwayman, Alfred Noyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: induced hallucinations, unreality, creepy/unsettling behaviour, body horror

_Coward._

I ignored it, as best as I could. I wasn’t responsible for Nathan. All I was responsible for right now was running—

—Running up the steel stairs that went up, up, with no exit in sight. Fucking hell. It was the bottom of a high-rise, I remembered that now, I’d seen it from outside. Well, that meant the only way out was _up,_ and I’d just make the rest up as I went along.

The door clattered open behind me, and I took off, throwing myself up the steps and taking them two at a time, hand glazing over the banister in an attempt to stabilize myself.

"I just want to talk," the voice drifted up behind me. "You don’t need to be so _panicky._ "

Panicky. Right. I came to a grinding halt two flights up. There was a door. I yanked on the handle—

Of course. It was locked. I could see the keycard reader next to it. Nothing for it. I could hear Kiera’s feet on the corrugated-metal stairs.

Another flight of stairs. My breaths were ragged, shallow; I didn’t like today. Nothing about today had been good.

(but that wasn’t true, I _liked_ Nathan except that I’d abandoned him with a stranger)

(and oh, oh I was _pissed_ that she’d hurt somebody who’d done nothing wrong)

(everybody’s done something wrong)

No thinking. Just running.

"Tell you what," came the horrendously calm voice from behind me. She wasn’t even running. Just walking. Her voice reverberated in the concrete chimney of the stairwell, sounding so normal. Like she couldn’t take on any face she pleased. Like she hadn’t hired me to solve a murder she’d probably committed. "We can do a trade. Help me and I’ll help you. Everybody gets something out of it."

(everybody’s done something wrong)

I was nauseous and it wasn’t just from the running. The more reasonable somebody sounded—the more work they put into sounding Presentable and Proper and Right—the less I trusted them. Anger was reliable. Anger made sense. Anger responded to anger.

I took another step—

And the banister began to melt under my hand.

Anger. I could stay angry. I tried. But I stared at it, trying to find some reason, some _realistic_ reason, why the metal was suddenly dripping like candlewax, distorting like one of those logic puzzles you see in MAD Magazine or—or—I don’t know.

I backed away from it until I was pressed against the concrete wall, and then Kiera was on the landing below me. Everything else was starting to distort too, dripping or melting or twisting.

"What does it look like?" she asked, incongruously.

I blinked, then took another step upwards, away from her.

"I don’t—" She shrugged, a small, wry smile on her face. "I can’t see it. Is it pretty?"

"Is what pretty?" But I knew what she meant. The way the clockface flowed over its edges and down onto the doorframe. The clouds that were phasing through the concrete from outside, thick nimbuses clouding the upper stratosphere of the high rise. The steps rippling like quicksand when I put my boot down on them.

I didn’t have room for fear, and I didn’t have any time for it. But even worse, warring with it in my throat, was a sense of wonder. What Will and Avery and Lila could do; that was one thing. This was…

"Weird," I said. _Amazing,_ I thought. And terrifying. All of them, in equal measure.

She reached out and touched me, fingers freezing cold against my face. The cold was enough to bring back to earth. But so was the sudden sense of _relief_ on her face, and I realized what it was she wanted me for.

I took off once more, a stitch forming in my side as I tried to ignore the world crumbling around me. The steps _looked_ like liquid, but I tried to focus on the solid way they felt beneath my feet. It was probably fine. Probably.

And then there was another door, and I threw myself against it. The bar clicked open, and I was outside.

On the roof.

With _her_ behind me.

"Okay," I whispered. "Time for a great idea." I didn’t see a fire escape. In fact, it was so dark out I couldn’t see much of anything. I wasn’t sure when the sun had set but I didn’t have time to think about it.

I turned around to face her as she came through the door, the light illuminating her from behind. She wasn’t that scary, really. Tall, with a black coat and black hair—striking, certainly. But she didn’t look that different from any other thirty-odd woman with a short haircut and a Beatnik fashion sense.

"I’m not asking you to do anything so terrible," she said, and the nausea roiled in my stomach. "I just need your help. I’m even _paying_ for it."

"No means no."

Whoever the nameless girl was, wherever she was, I had a feeling she was _avoiding_ Kiera. I hadn’t seen anything about a missing girl on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, the news channels… Even the places that had written articles on Gurjas (articles I’d scrolled past as fast as possible) hadn’t said anything about a missing teenager. That might mean nothing. That might mean everything.

"What if I told you I was trying to help her?"

"I would say you’re a bad liar."

A flash of something dark passed like a shadow behind her eyes. She took a few more steps towards me.

I stepped back from her and glanced down over the edge of the roof. I could survive that, maybe. If I made the dumpster…

_And if you don’t?_

I was stuck.

Something vibrated in my pocket, and I ignored it—except it kept buzzing. Well, I was going to die anyway. I dug into my pocket and answered Will’s phone. "Hello?"

" _I don’t recommend jumping,_ " came the voice through the speaker, smooth as butter with a casual disaffectedness that made the phrase even creepier.

"…What? Who is this?" I pulled the phone down from my ear and stared at the caller ID. _Ophis._ " _You’re_ Ophis? But you’re a girl—"

" _That’s sexist."_

"Yeah, I didn’t think before I said that," I babbled.

Kiera crossed her arms, raising her eyebrow. "Shall I let you finish your phone conversation?"

"No, I’ll just hang up and let you _kill_ me," I snapped.

"I don’t know why you think I’m going to kill you."

" _Don’t be fooled,_ " drawled Ophis from the phone, still in that detached tone. I couldn’t help but imagine her inspecting her nails. " _She’s definitely going to try to kill you._ "

"You’re very helpful," I whimpered into the cell. "Remind me to haunt you later."

" _Please hold._ "

Then the line went dead. I thought about pitching the phone off the building, but I didn’t want to have to explain to the next Salt who found my ghost that I’d wasted my last moments in petty rage.

I turned to face Kiera and noticed with a strange contentment that the moon had a face. Whatever drug Kiera’d given me, it was _good._ I mean, I was scared shitless. But still.

Kiera raised her hand and pulled it down. A thread of bronze appeared in the air above her fingers, and then like a rabbit out of a hat, the sword emerged. Not a sword like you see in those fantasy movies, with the broad blade; this was a _real_ sword, glittering in all the wrong colours and wickedly sharp.

"I won’t kill you. But I think maybe," Kiera said in a voice that had lost all of its charm, "you need to learn a little respect."

…Oh, I so wished she hadn’t said that. Now I _had_ to fight her. Anger had given way to fear a while ago, but now it was back, pumping adrenaline through my veins.

I dropped the useless phone onto the asphalt rooftop and raised my fists. "Better people than you’ve tried."

Kiera raised the sword–

A girl shot through the air, one leg outstretched, and her foot hit Kiera straight in the face. There was an audible crunch, and I saw a few spots of blood flying from her nose as she flew backwards in a beautiful arc. The sword careened out of her hand, and she hit the rooftop with a satisfying ‘thump.’

The girl -

The girl landed delicately on the rooftop, then winced and hopped back up, hovering a few inches off the asphalt. She was plump and well-dressed, her pencil-skirt, jacket and Mary-Janes not quite what I’d expected from somebody who’d just kicked an eldritch abomination in the face. For all I knew, I was still hallucinating.

She crossed her arms. "There’s three of us here now, not including the freshman. I suggest you retreat."

Kiera sat up, scowling at the newcomer. The distortions were still there, I realized—there was just less for them to affect out here, but the asphalt kept melting under her. It looked so funny, I almost laughed—but I didn’t want to attract her attention back to me.

Then, she _transformed._ I’d known she could do it. All the clues had been there. But actually seeing it…

Her flesh turned silver, where it shifted in place, shimmering under the moonlight, and slid into place. Her teeth melted into her skull, her eyes rolling backwards and sinking back into her face, and all of it collapsed in on itself, leaving only a small sparrow behind. Then the sparrow flew away.

I imagined that was how she’d vanished, before. Maybe she’d been a fly, or a spider. I don’t know how I’d missed the transformation, but maybe she could do it faster, slower, I didn’t know, I didn’t know _anything—_

I stared up at the moon. It was full, and that wasn’t right. It’d only been a crescent yesterday. And it was so bright, so bright that it hurt…

"Jamal."

Staring at it hurt. My eyes wouldn’t stop hurting—

Something hit my face, and I lashed out on impulse, my fist swinging out and brushing against fabric but not connecting. Then I opened my eyes, blinking away the stars.

It was daytime. It was daytime—and I’d been staring straight at the sun.

It wasn’t night at all.

Ophis—the first girl I’d ever seen who could fly—gave me a curt nod. "You’re the freshman."

I tried to come up with a snarky response. I didn’t have anything on hand, so I just let my hands drop by my side. I’d never hallucinated before, not like _this._ "What…what happened to me?" I asked, trying not to let my voice break.

"I think maybe it’s time to give you a proper welcome," she said, and gave me a smile that would have been friendly if it’d reached her eyes.


	17. The Girl in the Empty Classroom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These are the words it has written there,   
> Keen as the lance of the northern mourn;   
> The sword of Justice gleams in its glare,   
> And the arm of Justice, upraised and bare 
> 
> -At the Grave in Waldheim, Voltairine de Cleyre

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: mental health reference (vague), references to cops/gangs

I came to slowly, glimpses of memory mingling with whatever I’d been dreaming about. Ophis’s hair, pale blonde like cornwisps escaping from her bun—dappled forest glades, but I doubted those were real—the quicksilver glimmer of Kiera’s skin shifting, and screaming.

The stars I’d been staring at turned into a fuzzy light on the back of my eyelids, and when I opened my eyes, I was staring up at the scattered dots of a dropped linoleum ceiling. I would have sat up, but my entire body was aching. Adrenaline took its toll.

"Are you awake, or do you just sleep with your eyes open?"

"The first. I’m not enough of a freak for the second," I mumbled. My mouth was dry.

"Reasonable."

I supposed the owner of the voice was Ophis—it sounded like her, and from what I _could_ remember, I’d followed her home. Speaking of which—

"How much should I worry about the fact that I can’t remember how I got here?"

"Don’t," Ophis replied. "You’re traumatized. It’s normal."

Ah, yes, Traumatized. That word was coming up a lot. "More likely I’m over-tired," I grumbled, then sat up to try take in my surroundings. At first, I thought she was just short of furniture, but then I saw the stack of chairs and scattered desks at the far end, and looked over at Ophis scribbling on a chalkboard.

"Why am I sleeping in a classroom?"

"Because I live here."

That was blunt. That was a nice change. I looked up at the fluorescent bar lights, then poked the cheap mattress I was sitting on. Whatever school this was, nobody had used it in a long time.

"…Tech?"

She paused in the middle of her drawing, then chuckled. "You _are_ good. Yes, we’re downtown."

The old Tech school had been closed before I was born, but it’d been one of the first high schools ever opened in Ottawa. These days, most people just knew it as an empty sprawling building on Albert Street, with the occasional class or support group inside. I could see its appeal as a hideout.

I propped myself up against the wall, then realized what she was writing—or rather, drawing. It was a mandala, something I only recognized from the six or sessions of court-mandated therapy I’d been forced into after Johara’s accident. They were meant to calm you down, center your mind. She must have been nervous, not that I could tell from the cool way she carried herself. It was odd. When she’d shown up on that rooftop, she had looked so put together. I’m sure lots of people would have seen her exactly the same way now—she still had the suit on, and the bun of gold-white hair gathered at the nape of her neck.

_We’re all a little fucked up._

It was the careful way she was concentrating on the mandala, I decided. Living in an abandoned school was another big giveaway. Little pieces and clues.

"So, you can fly."

"You noticed," she replied, voice dripping with sarcasm.

I laughed despite myself. "Will didn’t get around to explaining that one, but I’m guessing that’s Air?"

"I suppose it’s one of the more obvious ones." She put down the chalk and turned to face me. Her face was so blank that I wondered if it was on purpose—I couldn’t tell whether I’d pissed her off personally or if she was just like this.

"My turn for questions."

I shrugged. I didn’t know what she could possibly ask. I was pretty much what I seemed.

"You’re a private detective?"

"Yeah. I mean… Sort of."

"Sort of?"

"I’m seventeen and my first case involved a dead body. I’m rethinking my career choices."

She stifled a smile at that, and I decided I liked her, ice queen or not. "I can understand that."

"Is your name actually Ophis?"

"No, that’s just what Will calls me in her phone. I’m the Cassandra."

I blinked. " _The_ Cassandra? I’ve met like, six Cassandras."

"It’s a title. But also my name."

"With or without the ‘the?’"

She waved her hand at me in irritation. "It confers authority."

"I’m sure it does," I said as evenly as I could. If I didn’t, I was going to crack up.

She glared at me, but I could see a twitch of a smile at the corner of her mouth. She wasn’t _that_ much older than me, and I could see her stony mask conflicting with a friendlier impulse. I got that. She didn’t trust me yet.

"Anyway," she said, getting to her feet. "Apparently Willow and Avery gave you a bit of an incomplete picture of things. They rushed it—and you’re too important. So given your, ah, precarious position, I’ve brought you here so we can brainstorm the best strategy to protect you."

…Well. That was a shift in the wind. I’d heard all the stuff about how there were only two Salts left, but it still took me by surprise. I wasn’t anything special. Except due to some mass-murderer, apparently, now I was.

Which brought up the main issue.

"Protect me from—Kiera? Who—or what, I guess—is Kiera?"

Cassandra paused, and I could see the uncertainty in her face. Probably deciding how much to tell me. For all that she was promising me useful answers, I wasn’t dumb enough to trust her _completely._ Whatever ‘the Cassandra’ was supposed to imply, she had some sort of power over Avery and Will. "Um, a wild card. We’re not sure if she’s actually responsible, but she’s not _helping._ "

"A Mercury elemental. Yeah?"

"Yes, but—something else as well."

"What?"

"We don’t know," she admitted. "She showed up a few months ago."

"And she’s the one killing the Salts."

"Like I said, we have no actual proof." Her eyes flashed cold. I could guess what her opinion on the matter was. "But she’s certainly dangerous."

"No _shit,_ Sherlock." A shudder ran up my spine thinking about the way she’d talked to me. _Looked_ at me. It had to be because of my powers. Nothing else. "I’m guessing she’s after me for the same reason everybody else is."

"Afraid so. Hence why we want to protect you—"

 _Hence._ Freakin’ rich kids. Whoever she was now, I had to guess she’d grown up with money. Then I held up a finger. "Wait, wait. Back up. You, Avery, Will—you keep insisting this isn’t a secret society. So who’s _we?_ "

Cassandra paused, then a smile spread across her face. Finally. There was somebody I thought maybe I’d like to know. "What do you know about anarchism?"

"Okay, that’s a bit of a strange start. Not much. Rejection of society?"

"Sort of. It’s a rejection of organized government and law in a broader sense, because, well… It’s not like it’s helped most of us."

It sounded ridiculous, but to be honest, it kinda made sense. All the same, I had to crack a joke. "Getting a lecture on political systems in a silent classroom. It’s high school all over again."

Cassandra crossed her arms, unimpressed. "You wanted to know."

"Okay, so you’re anarchists. What does that mean, other than the fact that you’re on the internet too much?"

"Anarcho-communists, actually—"

"Oh my _god._ "

"The point is, we organize horizontally, as much as is practical. Cooperation over coercion, and community over tyranny."

"I’ll pretend that makes sense. And what does that make you?"

"Well, we have leaders in a _way._ " Cassandra shifted a bit. "I’m in charge of the downtown area but that means more that I coordinate what I can, keep things levelheaded, intervene when necessary… Sometimes people need a tiebreaker."

"Uh huh. And when somebody decides _they_ wanna be in control?"

"It’s a lot less appealing for somebody to use their powers to screw around or hurt people if there’s ten other people with powers ready to stop them." She sighed. "And let’s face it, it’s not like we can call the cops."

I snorted. "Okay, that’s the first thing you’ve said that makes sense. I guess that’s why all of Will’s texts were encrypted."

"Among other reasons. You better not have broken it."

"Her _phone_ is _fine,"_ I muttered. "But you’re all basically off the grid. Right?"

"To some degree or another. I’m completely underground for reasons of my own. Avery legally exists but stays out of trouble. Willow’s in a grey zone."

I was curious about the implications of Cassandra not legally existing, but now wasn’t the time to ask. "And you’re telling me all of this because…?"

 _Now_ she was smirking. "You can go tell the cops if you want to. Have fun explaining."

…Crap. "Point. Okay, next question—"

"My turn," she interrupted. "How’d you get involved with Kiera?"

"I didn’t. I was working on a case."

"Okay, how’d you get involved with that? I had somebody check, and you’re not a registered private detective." She added, somewhat unnecessarily, "Not that you could be, legally. For one, you have to have graduated high school."

"Do you ever shut up?"

"On occasion, but rarely."

I sighed, leaning back and bonking my head against the plaster wall. "I put up a Facebook ad for investigative services. Mrs. Chaudhury showed up at my office. One thing happened after another."

"I see."

"Speaking of, how come _you_ aren’t all out there being superheroes? Especially you, flygirl."

"Never call me that again. And aside from the inherent impracticality of vigilante justice? We don’t have _time._ "

"Oh, come on. Who needs a job when you’re psychic?"

"And who’s going to pay somebody who isn’t supposed to exist? Besides, we’re not all psychics."

I was being facetious, but I couldn’t help it. It all sounded too… _perfect._ Besides, Cassandra was more spouting theory than really explaining how it worked.

I remembered Lila, and what she’d said. _Her turf._ Her territory. To be honest, that sounded a lot more like gangs. That figured—there was more than one leader, which worked with whatever semi-structured thing Cassandra was talking about. And Lila had been pretty forceful in trying to get me to come with.

Just like everywhere else. Lots of pretty theory and ideas, but underneath, it was just the same shit as usual. Then it clicked—that was why Cassandra looked so uncomfortable. Her system was breaking down, and she knew it.

I was a power play. And if their community was so perfect and welcoming and about uniting people with powers—well, where had they been when I needed them?


	18. Strangers Like Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And through long summer days it dreams old dreams   
> Of far-off southern forests, and the sighing   
> Of wind-blown boughs above bird-haunted streams;   
> But when the storm sets the white spindrift flying   
> It thrills and trembles with the old unrest, A  
> nd shakes the wild-rose petals from its breast. 
> 
> -The Broken Mast, F.O. Call

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: death, referenced violence, trauma, casual ableist/sexist language

"Alright," I said after a moment, trying to hide the lump in my throat. "You’re one of the bosses, you want to help people, you’re offering me protection from the crazy lady who wants to eat my soul." I crossed my arms. "What if I say no?"

Cassandra frowned. "Why on Earth would you say _no?_ "

I still liked her, to be fair. Her ideas were cool—but god, she was pretentious. I got up, brushing the dust off my jeans. "I don’t take charity. And I can take care of myself." I was interested to see what she’d do, whether her interest in ‘cooperation’ outweighed her desire for power.

She stared at me with a gobsmacked sort of horror. "…I _saved_ your _life._ "

"And then gave me the multilevel marketing pitch. How’s it work, convert two kids, get paid more?" I was being bitter, I _knew_ I was being bitter—

"Jamal."

I froze, turned my head—then drew my hands into my chest and tried to look a little less embarrassed. Jo drifted the rest of the way through the wall, looking like she’d kill me herself if she’d had any way to do it.

"…Yeah?" I replied, trying to sound unconcerned.

"Are you done being a jerk to Cassandra?" she asked with a quiet sarcasm.

"You’re not my babysitter," I grumbled, still trying to work off the humiliation of being told off by my little sister. The fact that Cass could only hear half the conversation only somewhat helped.

"No, I’m not." Suddenly, Jo was very close to me, hair rising around her face like a furious, awe-inspiring halo. "If I was your babysitter, I would ground you until you were thirty. I would be able to physically _stop_ you from picking fights with everybody, including—apparently—some eldritch hallucinogenic with a God complex! I would actually be able to _punish_ you for stealing somebody’s phone, trying to impersonate her and NEARLY! DYING!"

"…Oh, so you’re caught up."

"I hate you! SO MUCH!"

"No, you don’t."

"How can you be so flippant?" There were tears in the corners of her eyes, and she scrubbed at them. I stared at my feet, not quite acknowledging the guilt twisting in my stomach. I hadn’t planned for _any_ of this. But when it came to anything supernatural, if it didn’t involve the recently dead, I knew jack-shit.

"…Sorry," I mumbled. "For worrying you." Then before Jo could say anything, I nudged my head at Cassandra at well. "Sorry for calling your secret society a pyramid scheme."

She snorted. "It’s neither, but I appreciate the sentiment." Her face turned serious. "I really think you should accept the protection, though."

"Because I’m an asset."

"Because you’re one of us, whether you admit it or not."

I didn’t know how that made me feel, not really. I didn’t like that the decision had been made for me—but she wasn’t wrong, was she? _We’re all a little fucked up._ God, that had to be the one phrase that wouldn’t leave me alone.

"…One question before I go."

"Mm?"

"How old are you?"

Cassandra blinked. "Twenty. Why?"

"No reason." I kept my worries to myself—my morbid curiosity about the life expectancy of an elemental. "Just wondering how much of the baby I am," I said instead with a grin that probably looked as fake as it felt.

"You should probably be in school."

I could have brushed it off or blustered my way out of it like usual. Instead I just shrugged wearily, tucking my hands into my pockets. "…Yeah. I should be. I’ll catch you later." Then I headed out of the room.

I must not have been paying atten—scratch that. I’d definitely been distracted, and the classroom wall was thicker than I thought. Once I opened the door and stepped into the beige hallway, I could hear raised voices having some sort of argument.

"You _stabbed_ me!"

"Only a little!"

"Er…" I glanced uncertainly up at Jo, who was rubbing her temples with a small smile.

"You’re not the only idiot I’ve had to deal with today."

"…Will?"

"Among others. Go ahead. You’ll enjoy this," she said with a roll of her eyes.

"And this wouldn’t be revenge in any way?"

"Not in the slightest."

I didn’t believe her at all. I went to look anyway. I rounded the corner—and came to a halt, blinking.

Lila raised her eyes to me over Will’s shoulder and huffed. "Oh, now two against one! That’s just bullying."

"It was already two against one," said the man leaning against the far wall. He was watching the whole scene with an entertained, unbothered expression, which was what gave me the confidence that nothing _truly_ bad was happening.

Well, semi-confidence.

"You’re not, er, here to kidnap me again, are you?" I asked in a peculiar high-pitched voice. My nerves were a little shot.

"Not unless you’d like me to," she smirked at me, putting a hand on her hip, and I glanced down at her fishnet-clad legs for a moment before tearing my eyes back up to her face. Stupid sexy Lila. I might be ace, but gay panic still had its moments.

Will smacked her hand against her forehead with a loud, long-suffering groan. "You can be a violent creep _or_ a helpful, friendly member of the community. Not both!"

"Says you," Lila snarked. "How much money did you steal again?"

"That was years ago! You stabbed me _yesterday!_ "

I decided to sidestep them entirely and found myself drawn instead to the man leaning against the wall. He was taller than me by a head or so, with a thatch of dark ringlets falling into his brown face. I guessed he was probably in his late twenties or early thirties, much more put-together than me. No ragged denim jackets for him.

"Hey," he said with a smile. I could feel— _something._ I couldn’t place it, or recognize it. "I’m Isaiah. You must be Jamal."

I opened my mouth to ask how he’d known that. Instead, what came out was—"You’re a Salt. Aren’t you?"

He didn’t seem surprised that I knew, certainly not as surprised as I was. I’d never been near another Salt before. I hadn’t even _known_ there was anybody else like me—anywhere. And in all the times I’d imagined that there was, I had… well, I’d imagined—I’d imagined white people. I don’t know why. Not somebody with more melanin than me, with thick and curly hair and a broad nose and—

"Yes, I am," he interrupted my reverie. "It’s lovely to meet you. I was _really_ hoping I wasn’t the only one left."

Right. Stop staring.

"Th-this is my sister, Jo," I pointed down the hallway.

"We’ve met! She’s very polite and grown-up. You’ve raised her well."

My voice stuck in my throat again. "Th-thank you," I managed to rasp out. "Um—" I leant on the wall next to him, lowering my voice a bit. "Is Lila supposed to be here?"

"Don’t worry, she’s fine for now," he laughed. "She’s sort of like that drunken uncle you invite to Christmas. She means well, er, apparently. For somebody, sometimes."

"…Is everybody like this?"

"Everybody in the community?" He shook his head, laughing quietly. Not at me, I realized. "Your luck is just bad."

"Oh, great," I huffed. "So where are all the normal people hiding?"

"We have jobs, careers, kids. _These_ two just like getting into trouble."

That just made me think about Gurjas again. Kiera had hired me to solve his murder and find the girl that’d been with him. Screw her. But—"Did you know Gurjas?"

"Yeah," Isaiah breathed. "Yeah, he was…" He shifted, and for the first time in a while, I _felt_ the impact of Gurjas’s death. He hadn’t just been somebody’s husband, somebody’s father, a missing piece of a nuclear family that needed fixing. Talking to him was one thing. He didn’t talk about himself, ever. This was something else. "He was a good guy. Quiet, sweet—paid a lot of attention to the kids that usually fall through the cracks."

"What do you mean?"

"He worked in a psych ward. Lots of traumatized kids there—the ones who are over eighteen but still need the kind of help adults don’t get. We’ve actually found a lot of us that way."

I shivered. I didn’t like psych wards, but I couldn’t imagine being in one with a bunch of adults. Teenagers were bad enough.

"Listen," Isaiah cleared his throat, changing the subject, "I heard your friend Nathan ended up in the hospital. Do you want to go check on him?"

"I don’t know. Cassandra kind of made it sound like I wasn’t supposed to leave."

Johara snorted from behind me, and Isaiah gave her a slightly withering stare. "Be _nice_ to your sister. Cass is a little… intimidating. It’s not on purpose, don’t worry about it."

I glanced between Isaiah and Jo, trying to figure out how I felt about Jo locking eyes with, being _seen_ by, somebody else. Somebody who wasn’t me. God, how lonely had she been? A lurch of jealousy rose up in my chest, and I pushed it away.

"Nathan isn’t my friend really, but I wanna make sure he’s okay. It’s kind of my fault he got hurt."

"Don’t believe that for a second," interrupted Lila. I wasn’t sure when she and Will had stopped bickering, but my hackles rose instinctively. "Kiera’s a crazy bitch. If it wasn’t him, it’d be somebody else."

"Says the queen of the crazy bitches," Will grouched. "How many times do we need to go over the ‘good reasons don’t excuse actual crimes’ thing?"

"I haven’t _killed_ anybody!"

"Yet."

"Leave them to it," Isaiah mumbled with a despairing upwards glance. "God knows they’ll be doing this for the next two hours. Come on, my car’s out this way."

I followed him, then took a quick glance back at Will and Lila. Cass had reappeared at the end of the hallway, and I pretended not to see her watching me—even though, in its way, it was strangely comforting. It was weird. I didn’t know these people, and they didn’t know me—but we had something in common, something more than just where we lived and what we ate.

Hell. Maybe I would stick around after all.


	19. God's Children

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What do you think has become of the young and old men?   
> And what do you think has become of the women and children?   
> They are alive and well somewhere;   
> The smallest sprout shows there is really no death 
> 
> -Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: hospitals, implied childhood trauma

I didn’t know much about cars, but along the way I’d decided that they were kind of like dogs; they reflected their owners to a startling degree. Avery’s cab with its leather seats, black sleek exterior and dated design felt like Avery did—a little bit cryptic, surprisingly put-together, and more than a touch alive. Isaiah’s car, on the other hand, was a beaten-up blue sedan, with scratches on the windows.

Isaiah unlocked the doors, then opened the passenger side door for me. "She’s not much, but she’s mine."

I hesitated, then glanced quickly through the back windows. The back was full of boxes, some of them stacked two on top of each other.

"I—" No, I wouldn’t bother. There was no easy way to explain it to anyone. So, I slid into the front passenger seat, my stomach lurching. "What are all those boxes?" I asked, trying not to sound as nauseous as I felt.

"Oh, I’m a library tech. Those are book donations."

"Somebody donated all of _those?_ " My mouth fell open, and despite myself, I reached backwards and opened one of the box lids. Yep, books—books upon books, more than I’d ever seen at once. I went to libraries, sure, but usually for the wifi and the couches.

"Several people, but yes. Some of them have ghosts attached," he joked. At least, I thought it was a joke. I eyed the books nervously just in case.

I noticed that Jo hadn’t followed me and swallowed the worry down with the rest of the anxiety. She could do what she wanted—and it meant that I could ask the questions that plagued me without her doing her concerned cluck at me. That sounded ungrateful, but it was true.

"Do you, um…" My courage failed me, and instead, I closed my eyes as he started up the engine. I hated cars. I hated cars, _so_ fucking much. It was fine when I was in the back. I didn’t have to look out the windshield that way.

"Yeah?"

Well, now he was asking. "Do you _like_ ghosts? I mean, do you—I don’t know. Have ghostly friends? How does it work for you?" I sounded so pathetic. I was just as much of a Salt as he was… except that I hadn’t even known it was a thing.

I opened one eye. He had a somewhat puzzled expression on his face. "I mean, I have a few. I’m not sure I was expecting that question."

"Why?"

"Well… Johara. She’s your sister. And she’s a ghost."

"She doesn’t count," I huffed. "I mean ghosts you don’t _know._ "

"They’re usually pretty nice. They get a little forgetful sometimes, but I think you knew that."

"But they don’t… bother you?"

"Why would they? Maybe a little when I was a kid."

I don’t know why that hit me so hard. "Y-you were a kid?" The unspoken _too_ didn’t need saying. As much as I loved to deny it, I was seventeen; that was still a kid to most people.

"Mhm." He stopped at an intersection, and I suppressed the urge to throw up. _Motion sickness,_ I told myself. "You don’t like ghosts, huh?"

I swallowed it down and shrugged. "I don’t know."

Isaiah didn’t say anything else. Then he lifted his hand, and before I knew what was happening, his hand was on my head, ruffling my hair. I blinked, a flush of embarrassment rising to my face, then pulled my hair in front of my face, feeling like an idiot. It was such an affectionate gesture, and he’d done it without _thinking._

"I’m glad you’re okay."

"You don’t even _know_ me," I complained.

"No, but I’m glad I get the chance."

He was so freakin’ _sincere_ about it. It was cheesy and kind of cringey, and I liked it. I wasn’t used to sincere people, and now I’d had to deal with a bunch of them at once.

"Let’s just get to the hospital."

"Want some music?"

I wondered if he was offering because he liked music, or because he’d noticed how much I hated being in the car. But I nodded, and next thing I knew, he’d slid a cassette (a cassette? In the year 2016? How old _was_ he?) into the tape deck. A few moments later, the music began to chug through the air, and I laughed in disbelief.

"Is this pop-punk? I thought you were an adult."

"It’s _grunge,_ you fetus. And my generation invented it."

"How old even are you?"

"Uh…" He thought for a moment. "Can I still say thirty-nine?" he said ruefully.

"What." I stared up at him. "You’re _forty?_ "

"I’m trans, which apparently means eternal youth."

I blinked some more and flushed again at the sight of his mouth twitching up at the corner. "…But…"

"We’re not _all_ bratty teenagers, you know."

"Hey!"

"I _meant_ Will and Cass, but I suppose you count."

I crossed my arms and sulked, even though I was enjoying myself.

"We’re here," he said finally, and I suddenly remembered—I was going to have to tell Nathan _something._

"Uh, Isaiah?"

"Yeah?"

"What’s the policy on telling, you know…" I swallowed. "Normies? Normal people? About this stuff?"

"It’s… recommended against."

I rubbed my temples. "Nathan’s in the hospital because Kiera knocked him out. I have to come up with something good if I can’t tell him."

"Afraid I can’t help you—I don’t know the man."

"He’s my roommate. I barely know him either." I hopped out of the car, then kicked at the curb in a bad temper. "Alright, up we go." Cars and hospitals. All sorts of fun today.

"He’s on the fifth floor, according to Avery."

"Right." Stupid Civic Hospital. I’d considered burning it down before, even though they’d done their best. What a fucking infuriating sentence. ‘We did everything we could.’

Mind on the present, Jamal. Nathan was fine. The worst he’d have would be a minor concussion. It didn’t stop me from feeling the linoleum floor slip out from under my feet as we walked up to the desk, the past infecting the present with infinite pressure.

"Nathan Beaufort?"

"Room thirty-three.”

Then we were there, and I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding when we stepped into the room and Nathan glanced up from his book with a growing smile.

"Jamal! You came to visit me!"

"Well, yeah." I managed a smile. "I still need your rent."

Nathan snorted, then rubbed at his head. "I’ll be released tonight, I think? They wanted to keep me for twenty-four hour observation. Apparently, I have a minor concussion."

Called it. "Do you, um—remember what happened?"

Nathan’s blue eyes flickered almost imperceptibly towards Isaiah. Then… "Nah. I guess I tripped or something."

He was lying. I could tell that as easily as I could tell the sky was blue. But it was a lie that seemed to work in my favour for now, so I decided to roll with it, and start poking holes in it later.

Then another familiar voice cut through the quiet buzz of machines and IV drip. "I’m sorry."

I suppressed my response when I noticed that Nathan hadn’t heard it. Isaiah had, though. Which meant—

I glanced over at the chair next to Nathan’s bed. Gurjas was sitting there, the chair clipping through his legs and arms in awkward places, and he was watching over Nathan with a protective air that reminded me that he was a father. I wondered where Nathan’s family was. If he’d even told them he was in trouble. I supposed he wasn’t, really; but it still made the room feel that much more desolate.

"My name’s Isaiah. I’m a friend of Jamal’s and the person who brought you here—I’m glad you’re okay. Want to get some food down at the caf? I’ll push you in a wheelchair if you want."

Nathan raised his eyebrow, but between being… well, Nathan, in all his awkward glory, faced with one of the most charming men I’d ever met, he was definitely going to say yes. "Alright."

I waited til they were gone, then sat down on the bed that Nathan had just vacated. "You’re here. I didn’t expect that," I said to Gurjas.

Gurjas steepled his fingers on his knee. "I had no idea she would come after you. I didn’t—I didn’t intend for that to happen."

I chewed on my lip. "What I don’t understand is… why me in the first place? How’d you even know?"

"Elementals have a glow to us. It’s even more obvious once you’re a ghost. Don’t ask me why; I just know that once I crossed over, you were like a beacon."

"But Chandra couldn’t hear you."

A smile flickered at his mouth, and he stroked his beard. "It really is a shame you’ve only had yourself to rely on. Ghosts can appear to anybody in dreams, if they have a close enough connection, and they know how."

"So, she dreamed about me."

"Yes."

"And hired me, and—" I groaned. "I still don’t understand. Why not Isaiah? He’s an adult. He has a _car._ And money," I added somewhat glumly.

"Isaiah has children of his own. I won’t have another family torn apart on my behalf."

"So, I’m expendable."

"You’re young, and stubborn, and furious. A good combination."

"All you wanted was for me to find your body."

"Yes."

I hesitated, then drove forward anyway. Young and stubborn and furious. I could work with that. "What about the girl?"

Gurjas closed his eyes. He was solid today—I could see every curl of his beard, every fold of his turban. "She’s safe."

"She’s alone, isn’t she?"

He avoided my eyes.

"I know you want her protected. There’s a reason you haven’t said anything about her, isn’t there?" I’d theorized about Gurjas being a molester, a killer, a cheater. But now, looking at the grief and fear on his face, I knew it couldn’t be anything so cruel. "Is she your kid?" I asked.

"Not by blood. She needed help."

This was the most Gurjas had ever spoken, and I could hear the difference. Before, he’d been so stoic that there was very little to read off of him. This time, though, he was shaken. He hadn’t expected Kiera any more than I had.

"I want to protect her too," I urged. "But I need to know a little about her first. At least enough to know why Kiera wants her so badly."

"I won’t tell you where she is. It’s too dangerous." Then his voice softened a little. "Her name is Jaylie. She’s eighteen."

"And that’s all you’ll tell me?"

"Yes. Unless you can show me how you’ll protect her—and yourself." He jabbed an insubstantial finger at me. "I’ve had enough of my kin die. I won’t have another child on my conscience."

"Alright. I promise."

"Promise what?"

God, he really was a father. "I promise not to throw myself headfirst into danger at _every_ available opportunity," I added.

"Excellent."

I paused. Nathan and Isaiah would be back soon. "…Chandra invited me to your funeral." I shifted on the bedclothes, trying to figure out if I was crossing some invisible line of etiquette. "Would you be alright if I—"

"Of course. Of course, I’d be honored."

I felt a lump rise in my throat. I wished I’d gotten to know him while he was alive. Maybe that was why I was so uncomfortable around ghosts most of the time. The sense of missed opportunity.

Still, I had a plan in place. I’d go to his funeral. Then after that, I’d figure out where Jaylie was hiding, and how to keep her safe from Kiera. I’d talk to the rest of the community about it. I’d figure it out, like I always did.


	20. Honour the Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A noontide have you been in our twilight, and your youth has given us dreams to dream.   
> No stranger are you among us, nor a guest, but our son and our dearly beloved. 
> 
> -The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: religion, death/grief, reality distortion, attack on/near a place of worship
> 
> (Thank you J. Deo for your wonderful sensitivity reading and consultation on this chapter!)

"Are you sure this is alright?" I asked, for the third time that night.

Will scoffed, adjusting my collar with a focused expression. "No reason it wouldn’t be. You gotta relax."

"I just—how do I explain to people how I knew him?"

"Would you stop _moving?_ I haven’t tied a tie in four years—"

"You don’t have to," Isaiah said from the other end of the room, fixing the buttons on his white shirt in the mirror. "You’ve never been to a Sikh temple, have you?"

"I’ve never even been to a _church._ I don’t think either of you understand how completely out of my depth I am here," I complained. I knew I was beivng whiny, but it was that or find something else to take out my problems on.

"You’re the one who wanted to go," Will shot back, tossing her hair over her shoulder and still fiddling with some of my hair to make it lie flat. I’d already told her that her efforts were wasted, but she was apparently just as stubborn as I was. "I’m just as happy not to. I feel like I’d probably burst into flames once I crossed the threshold."

Isaiah rolled his eyes. "Sikhism isn’t like that. Everyone’s welcome here, that’s kind of their whole thing—and as far as trans stuff goes, this temple’s pretty good."

"You’ve also been read as a dude for what, fifteen years? I still have to shave every day and quite aside from that, I dress like a skank." Will caught my worried expression and snickered. "A cute, feminist skank. Is that better?" Then she shrugged. "I dress nice, I get read as a guy."

I couldn’t imagine that somehow, but I supposed I’d just gotten used to it. I’d had a few trans friends in school, most of them closeted, and I could appreciate Will’s wariness. Still, I wished it wasn’t just me and Isaiah. The realization that we were the _only_ two Salts left in Ottawa was starting to sink in. I hadn’t been asked to stabilize anybody yet, but I imagined it was just a matter of time, as terrifying as the prospect was.

"You haven’t stolen my phone again, have you?"

" _Go to hell,_ " I snarled, then felt myself turning pink at her grin. Okay, that had helped. I pulled my own phone out, waggling it vaguely in her direction. "I have my own, thanks."

Isaiah cleared his throat. "If you’re done flirting?"

"Not flirting," I mumbled in sudden embarrassment. "Fine, let’s get going."

I glanced in the mirror, double-checking my outfit one last time. The dress shirt and jacket was a bit big on me, and despite Will’s insistence I thought the tie was kind of overkill, but the slacks fit well enough. I couldn’t shake the discomfort over not having my denim jacket, but after one attempt to put it on, Will had fixed me with such a withering glare that I thought _I_ might burst into flames.

As it turned out, though, the Sikh temple was refreshingly low-key, at least from outdoors. I’d expected cupolas, maybe a mosque or stained glass windows—I didn’t have a lot to draw on. Instead, it was a simple, kind of blocky building, with glass doors leading into a lobby.

The real surprise was walking in and realizing that, for the first time in my life, I _did_ look like I belonged. There were plenty of white folks mixed in with the crowd, but the crowd itself was—

"They’re all _brown,_ " I said with a quiet thrill. "Er, Indian, right? South Asian?" I desperately tried not to embarrass myself in front of Isaiah.

Instead, he just gave me a gentle nudge with his shoulder. "White family, huh?" he asked.

"Several," I grumbled. "Most of them shitty. One of them called me Gemma for _two years._ "

"Ouch. If it helps, I can relate."

I searched the crowd for Mrs. Chaudhury, and finally found her in a white dress, talking to some others. I was too nervous to approach her, though, and stood there like an idiot for a little while until Isaiah tapped me gently on the shoulder.

"Whuh?"

He was standing with another woman in a long dress wrap, who smiled at me and handed me a kerchief. "It’s important to cover your head inside the gurdwara," she said, and she didn’t sound mad, but I still swallowed awkwardly. Oops. Maybe I should have done more than a cursory Google.

"Alright." I did my best to tie the kerchief over my head, and bit back a curse as my hair kept slipping out of the way. I didn’t know for sure, but I figured swearing was _also_ pretty disrespectful.

"Here, here." Isaiah stood behind me and bundled my ponytail up under the kerchief, knotting the scarf underneath it.

"Thanks," I mumbled. "I’m bad at this."

"It’s alright, dear," said the woman, giving me a pat on the shoulder. "Be quiet and respectful, take off your shoes and wash your hands. You’ll be alright. My name’s Hushaima." She took my hand in both of hers. "I’m Gurjas’s cousin. It’s lovely to meet you."

"H-hi. I’m Jamal."

"Why don’t you two sit next to me during the ceremony? You look awfully lost."

Isaiah nodded, and I decided to follow his lead. Everybody was dressed so _beautifully—_ I hadn’t known anything about Sikhism aside from a few basic details before meeting Mrs. Chaudhury, and now I felt myself both intimidated and entranced by a world I’d never been part of, so different from the isolated life I led. If I died, who would come to my funeral? Who would even know?

That wasn’t the point. I jerked myself away from the cycle that I knew I’d worry myself into. Today wasn’t about me. So instead I followed Hushaima and Isaiah into the temple itself, sliding my shoes off of my feet and shaking the last drops of water off of my hands.

—

The ceremony was much shorter than I’d imagined, although I had the strange feeling I was picking things up in the middle. There were readings from scripture and hymns, both of them impenetrable to me, but they sounded nice. I hoped Gurjas could hear them. Once it was over, someone came around and started handing out something that looked kind of like cookie dough. I glanced nervously around, then by the time he reached me, I just did what everybody else was doing, and offered my cupped hands, letting him scoop out a dollop. "Th-thank you?"

"It’s the prashad," Hushaima explained, obviously entertained by my ignorance. "It’s been blessed and given as a religious offering. Now we hand it out to everybody to eat, in Gurjas’s memory and in devotion."

"Oh… so, kind of like communion."

There was a quiet noise from behind me as Isaiah struggled to contain his reaction. "Not quite," he managed to say. "For one, it tastes good."

"Ah." I took a bite. It was sweet, warm, and melted on my tongue.”What--" I stopped myself again, and took another bite.

"It’s good?’

" _Yes._ " Then I stared down at my napkin. "…Also, apparently I was hungry. Thank you." I decided not to ask what it actually _was._ Somehow the mystery made it better.

People began to trickle out of the hall, and I crumpled my napkin, depositing it in the garbage on my way out. When I turned around, Chandra was standing with Hushaima, her white dress and headscarf soft against the surroundings, and she smiled at me. "I wasn’t sure if you’d come."

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. "Well, you know. I wanted to—" Then I shrugged. Words were stupid.

Chandra opened her arms and drew me into a hug, planting a gentle kiss on my forehead. Then she withdrew, smiling at Hushaima. "This is the private investigator I was talking about."

"Really?" Hushaima looked at me with new eyes, and I swelled a little with pride. "You’re so young! That’s impressive. Maybe I should hire you."

I bit back the _please I am poor,_ and instead nodded as solemnly as I could muster. I was trying to be good.

"Where are the kids?"

"Oh, Akal has them. They’re playing with their food again, but at least that means Ruben isn’t wandering off trying to catch leaves again."

I stifled a snicker. That sounded like kids to me. Then—I didn’t know how to describe it. _Something_ changed. Something roiled, sick, in my stomach. I pressed a hand to it, wondering what was wrong. Maybe it was just how quickly I’d eaten that prashad stuff.

Chandra frowned slightly. "Ohh, I might have to lie down. I can feel a headache coming on."

"It’s been a hard day! Don’t worry a bit. I’ll take care of cleanup—"

"Shush," I said, interrupting Hushaima. "Sorry."

Isaiah glanced at me. I ignored him, and then looked— _properly_ looked at Chandra’s dress. It was harder than it should have been—it kept shimmering, like heat-haze. That wasn’t just the dress, I realized. It was everything. The roof of the hall was covered in crystals that winked out of existence the moment I looked at them. And-

The dress. The dress was the giveaway.

"Chandra, what colour is your dress?" I asked.

"White, of course."

"No, it isn’t," I said quietly.

She looked down at the dress, which was drenched in emerald green, the colour still trickling down towards the hem. "...Did I spill something on it? Where did all that _blue_ come from—?"

It only took me a moment to be sure. Then I took off for the door.

"Wait!"

I couldn’t wait. I stopped just inside of the glass doors, bare feet arching against the tile.

Kiera stood in the parking lot outside, her poison leeching into the air. She saw me, and her eyes glowed that awful, bitter green, and she smiled with teeth like needles.


	21. Heartbeats Between The Match and the Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves  
> Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:  
> All mimsy were the borogoves,  
> And the mome raths outgrabe.
> 
> -Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: violence, threats towards a child, sexual harassment, emotional abuse, attack on/near a place of worship, trauma, reality distortion
> 
> Thank you to J. Deo (@JDeoWrites) for the fantastic sensitivity reading and consultation on this chapter!

I opened the gurdwara doors with both hands, walk turning into a march across the asphalt as I approached her. My feet ached with each spike of the asphalt, but I could ignore that—what I _couldn’t_ ignore was the bile in my mouth, the blood welling from my tongue where my teeth were digging into it, the salt from—I don’t know where. The sky turned orange, then purple, rotating through a kaleidoscope.

"How dare you? How _dare_ you?" My vision swam, and for a moment, I thought it was the Mercury affecting me even more. Then I dragged the back of my hand over my face, and it came away wet. I was crying. That was just—that was pathetic. I knew _why—_ it was because for all her horror, I’d hoped that Kiera—that _anybody—_ would be better than this. I didn’t feel that way often. "This is his _funeral._ "

"I figured you’d be here," she said, sweeping hair out of her face. It was slightly longer than before, messier, less elegant than it had been. Her coat was tattered at the edges, too, although I knew I couldn’t trust what I saw. "I didn’t take you for the sentimental type, though."

"There’s sentimentality, and then there’s not being a shit excuse for a human being. I’m not giving you what you want." It stung. I knew it was meant to, but _sentimental_ was just another word for _weak._

"Even if I were to, say…" She unsheathed her sword, balancing it by its tip on the pavement, "give you some incentive?" The asphalt rippled out from the tip, the world warping it into water. None of them were permanent changes; I’d figured that much out. Just a hallucination. It didn’t make it any less distracting.

"Nice try. I’m not delivering some poor innocent kid to you so you can… god, I don’t think I _want_ to know what you want with her."

"Uh huh." Kiera cocked her head. "What if I just asked you to spend time with me?" She lifted her eyebrows questioningly.

"You’re threatening to attack a place of worship so I’ll go on a date with you? That’s new levels of disgusting."

"Oh, don’t be silly. I have no intentions of attacking the temple. There’s enough gods I have to deal with on their own. I’m not adding another one to the mix."

I couldn’t get my head around that statement. I knew Kiera wasn’t exactly sane but also, I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t sure how comfortable I felt with the idea of actual, real _gods_ being a thing. "Good. I was hoping you still had some humanity."

Kiera’s eyes grew very cold. "You don’t know anything about me." She lifted her sword from the ground and raised it to my neck.

I gulped, trying not to think about how sharp it was. Or the fact that Kiera was stone cold enough to threaten somebody with a _sword_ in the first place. "Alright. You got me. I don’t."

"There’s nothing _human_ about me. Nothing at all," she spat.

I raised my hands. "Then what are you?"

"Didn’t your mother read you any fairytales?" she asked mockingly, and if the sword had been anywhere else than hovering against my jugular, I would have punched her in the face. That _had_ to be deliberate. I didn’t know how, but it had to be. "I am Aes Sidhe. One of the thousand hidden people."

"A-and for those who don’t speak anything that isn’t English?" I asked. My voice had gotten all funny and high pitched again.

"The monster under your bed," she crooned. "The darkness in the light. The children of the new moon." She was getting closer and closer to me, and something sparked on my skin like fire. Then she was so close that I could feel the static between our bodies. Her long coat was swishing against my legs. I could feel her breath on my cheekbone, full of malice. "I’m a faerie. And you are _nothing._ "

"Then why are you so close to me?"

Her hand rose to my chin. "Because I know you," she said, her voice full of astonishment. "You’re nothing, because you’re human. But…" She let it hang in the air, inviting me to read into the quiet speech, to feel the longing in her touch.

She was going to kiss me.

"Where’d you get a sword?" came the voice from behind me, and I suppressed the urge to cry. What had Chandra been saying earlier? I’d ignored it. It hadn’t been relevant. "It’s cool! I want one."

Kiera lowered the sword from my neck, hatred simmering from her eyes. I glanced over my shoulder, wincing as the bronze blade bit into my skin. A little boy, maybe six years old, stood there staring at us. In one of his hands was a samosa he must have nabbed from the temple kitchen. He had Gurjas’s eyes, and my brain filled in the name. _Ruben._

"A child." Kiera’s mouth twisted, and then she smiled again, her teeth turning black. "Another of you. Everywhere I turn around."

She raised the sword, and several things happened at once. I saw Ruben’s eyes widen. Behind him, Chandra was hammering on the lobby door, held back by some other congregation members. The door swung open, and Kiera raised the sword over Ruben, who stuttered, fell backwards and stared up at her with growing horror.

I swung out at Kiera, my fist landing against her face. She stumbled back, and Ruben began to crawl backwards, looking back over his shoulder at his mother. Then the claws came raking out of her sleeve, sharp and cruel, and I felt then lash across my face. I barely felt it.

I grabbed at her arm, but she tore it away, then went for Ruben again. It was like slow-motion, watching her ready the point, ready to kill him where he stood for some crime I couldn’t understand…

A splintering crash shattered the air, and something wooden flew through the air from the lobby, shedding shards of broken glass as it came. Kiera saw it coming, and turned away, but not fast enough—it hit her lengthways with a sick ‘thud’, and continued the length of the parking lot.

I stared at it, then turned my head to look back at the shattered lobby. Chandra was running out of the temple, her feet bleeding from the shattered glass, her eyes wild and hair coming out of her veil. She crouched over Ruben, gathering him into her arms. "Shh, shh, it’s okay…"

The wooden bench—torn out of the floor, I realized, looking at the pieces of carpet still embedded to its legs—began to move, and Kiera emerged from underneath it. I’d resisted some of whatever she did to the world before, but now it was getting worse. The parking lot asphalt was shattering, blooming with flowers that disappeared once I tried to clutch them. The sky was falling.

I plunged my hand into my pocket. I hadn’t brought most of my stuff with me, but funeral or not, I was always paranoid, I was always ready for something to happen. My wallet, my keys—I tossed them aside for later. And then, there it was. My knife.

Kiera ignored me, setting a beeline for Chandra and Ruben. She passed by me, and I lunged forward, burying the steel knife into her thigh.

The howl of pain that came from her mouth proved to me that she wasn’t human at all. She sounded more like a wolf, or a panther. I was too dazed to make much sense of it, why my knife had worked so well. She collapsed to her knees, turning on me with a seething expression.

Then the earth began to shake. I looked away from her, searching around for the source of it—I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that a random earthquake had just happened. When I looked back, she was gone. But the ground was still trembling.

I looked over at Chandra, who had Ruben held tight to her chest and was murmuring something under her breath. Then I remembered what Will had said about Salts. Why I was so important. How we got our powers. It all clicked into place. What could be more traumatizing than seeing your child in mortal danger, inches away from your husband’s funeral?

I stumbled over towards her, and wrapped my arms around both her and Ruben. Willed the power I didn’t know I had, that I didn’t understand, to calm her down. I didn’t know how it worked – whatever I was, whatever I had – but I hoped it was enough.

"Is she gone?" Chandra whispered.

"She’s gone," I murmured in reply. And I could feel it—the tension easing out of her arms, the heartbeat beginning to slow, the breaths evening out. The quaking stopped, finally, and Chandra began to cry. Not the desperate but still restrained crying she’d done when she first came to my office—instead, these were heartbroken sobs, tearing out of her throat like knives.

"Not my children, please, not my babies, not this time, _please…_ "

"You’re safe. Ruben’s safe."

"I miss him," Chandra sobbed. "I miss him so much."

"I know."

She took more and more deep breaths, then reluctantly released Ruben as Hushaima came over to us. The ground below us really was shattered—it wasn’t one of Kiera’s tricks. Chandra had caused a real earthquake—just a small one, but a real one nonetheless.

Finally, she turned to me, eyes red and sore. "What’s happening to me?" she whispered. She’d been scared for her kids before, and for her husband, when she’d first come to me. Now she was scared for herself.

"I can’t tell you. Or at least not very well. But I know somebody who can."

My hands were tingling. I didn’t know if it was from adrenaline or from calming Chandra down. But the anger, the fury at Kiera for her destructive presence—that was still there. I didn’t have any answers – no solid ones anyway. Gurjas’s murderer, Jaylie, the dead Salts…

That wasn’t true. I was more powerful than I’d ever believed. I knew that I was in danger. And I knew that – whatever other danger was out there – I had a monster of my own to deal with.

Fuck being protected and looked after. To hell with it.

Kiera was going to need protection from me.

END BOOK ONE


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